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 growth of the Web outside the English-literate world.

For instance, in China, many popular websites are named after significant number combinations. One of China's most popular websites is an eBay-type auction site called 8848.net. The number 8848 is a play on the height of Mount Everest in meters and the lucky number eight, which sounds like prosperity in Chinese.

Companies that specialize 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, from both Asia and the United States.

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.

A big mess?

"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 that oversees Web addresses in China ending in ".cn."

CNIC has also launched a similar service letting people register websites in the Chinese language. This service, as well as similar moves by Korea's Internet administrator, in effect offers a competing system that allows the whole address, including the suffix, to be written using no English.

The Chinese government, along with the Internet Society, a US-based non-profit group, criticized 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 $20 billion, disputes.

Glitch-free system expected

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 of 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 -- of dollars in 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 $173.1 million in revenue in its third quarter ended September 30.

Besides Web addresses that end in country codes, such as ".uk" for the United Kingdom, 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 stop 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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