Asian language Web names spell trouble

Eric Lai

LOS ANGELES: Internet names in Asian languages ending in the coveted

".com" were criticized on Monday at a meeting of the Internet's

governing board for being technically premature and encouraging a new wave of

cyber-squatting.

VeriSign Inc.'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 - 8848 is a play on the height of Mount Everest in

meters and 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 the final ".com" or ".gov"

suffix.

Companies that specialize in selling Web domain names reported strong initial

demand for Asian language Web site names last week. Register.com, a US-based

company, said it had received thousands of applications, both from Asia and from

the United States.

But some attendees at the annual meeting of the Internet Corporation for

Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 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 Web sites, and more.

Too many technologies



"Too many technologies are confusing. It could cause a big mess," said
Qian Hualin, deputy director of the China Network Information Center (CNNIC),

the semi-governmental group which oversees Web addresses in China ending in

".cn."

CNNIC has also launched a similar service letting people register Web sites

in Chinese language. This service, as well as similar moves by Korea's Internet

administrator, in effect offer 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", 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



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 Web sites. 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 prevent cybersquatters - people who buy up Web site names in the hope of

auctioning them off later for high prices.

"First come, 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."

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.