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Wednesday Nov 15 2000
| Updated 0022 hrs IST 1352 EST
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LOS
ANGELES
INTERNET names in Asian languages ending in the
coveted ".Com” were criticised on Monday at a meeting of the
internet's governing board for being technically premature and
encouraging a new wave of cyber-squatting.
VeriSign's
global registry services, which oversees all internet
addresses such as ".net” and ".org” except those ending in
country codes, last week began accepting registrations using
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.
Proponents
say that VeriSign's system will speed the take-up of the web
outside the English-literate world. For instance, in China,
many popular web sites are named after significant number
combinations.
One of China's most popular web sites is
an eBay-type auction site called 8848.net the lucky number
eight, which sounds like prosperity in Chinese. Web addresses
were generally limited to the 26 letters of the English
alphabet, 10 numerals and a hyphen. With VeriSign's system,
the multi-lingual addresses are still half in English, using
final ".Com” or ".gov” suffix.
Companies that
specialise in selling web domain names reported strong initial
demand for Asian language website names last week.
Register.com ,
a US-based company, said it had received thousands of
applications, both from Asia and from the US.
But some
attendees at the annual meeting of the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers said introducing Asian-language
domain names now could prove disruptive to an
increasingly-overburdened domain name system, as well as being
confusing for users.
That could lead to misdirected
e-mail, disappearing websites, and more. "Too many
technologies are confusing. It could cause a big mess,” said
Qian Hualin, deputy director of the China Network Information
Center, the semi-governmental group which oversees web
addresses in China ending in ".cn.”
CNNIC has also
launched a similar service letting people register websites in
Chinese language. This service in effect offer a competing
system that allows the whole address, including the suffix, to
be written using no English. — Reuters
The Chinese
government, along with the Internet Society, a US-based
non-profit group, criticised the introduction of VeriSign's
multilingual service.
The Internet Society put out a
strongly worded statement, calling VeriSign's current testing
"premature under the technical standards of the internet” and
asking it to delay its launch until its engineering group
works out compatibility standards.
That's a charge
that security software maker VeriSign, which entered the web
domain business when it bought Network Solutions earlier this
year for $20bn, disputes.
The Internet Society's
"concerns are not warranted,” said Brian O'Shaughnessy, a
spokesman for VeriSign.
He acknowledged that
VeriSign's technical infrastructure allowing domain names to
be translated back and forth between English and other
languages was still buggy, but said the system would be
glitch-free by its expected launch by year end.
"We
don't want to hurt the net in any way,” he said. "No e-mails
will get lost.”
What's at stake are millions — if not
billions — in dollars of revenue from the
increasingly-lucrative business of signing up websites. For
instance, sales of domain names and related services made up
an estimated half of VeriSign's $173.1m in revenue in its
third quarter ended September 30.
Besides web
addresses that end in country codes, such as ".uk” for the UK,
there are currently seven top-level domain names. But ICANN's
board of directors this week will rule on the addition of a
number of new Web domains. Proposed ones include .kids , .geo
, .xxx and others.
Critics say those possible new
domain names, along with the just-introduced multilingual
domain names, highlights VeriSign and ICANN's inadequate
policies to prevent cybersquatters — people who buy up website
names in the hopes of auctioning them off later for high
prices.
"First come and first serve is the wrong way
to approach it,” said Naseem Javed, an expert on corporate
trademarks and branding. Creating new foreign language domain
names will "multiply the problem.”
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