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Follow UsEric Lai
SAN FRANCISCO: Now, speakers of Euskara and Pinyin can register their
Internet domain names in their native tongues. In a move that further opens up
the Internet to non-native English speakers, VeriSign Inc. on Monday opened up
registrations for Internet domain names in more than 70 additional,
mostly-European languages.
Internet users will be able to choose Web site and e-mail addresses that use
special letters, accents and marks particular to Western European languages such
as French, German, and Spanish, to supplement the standard Roman letters and
numbers currently used.
Internet infrastructure and security provider VeriSign is also adding Web
domain names using Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, such as used by Russian
speakers, which were absent hitherto from its worldwide database of domain
names.
Some of the more esoteric languages that VeriSign now supports include
Euskara, spoken by the Basque people in Spain; Pinyin, which is Mandarin Chinese
written using Roman letters instead of Chinese characters; and Esperanto, the
'universal' language created in the 19th century by a Polish linguist.
The latest batch of multi-lingual domain names by Calif.-based VeriSign comes
close to the heels of the company's launch of Chinese, Japanese and Korean
language domain names, four months ago.
More than 800,000 Web domains in these Asian languages have been registered
by individuals and speculators hoping to sell off choice Web addresses at high
prices. These domains are still in the process of being tested, meaning that
users cannot yet access Web sites in Asian languages.
Internet is English-centric
The new multilingual domains could help reverse the perception that the
Internet remains an English-centric medium. As many as eight in ten Web sites
primarily feature English-language content, despite the fact that native English
speakers only make up about 7 per cent of the global population.
For VeriSign, which acquired this database of domain names when it bought
Network Solutions Inc. last year for $21 billion, this offers a fresh market as
registrations of English domain names slow down. There are more than 28 million
top-level domain names, which mostly end in .com, .net and .org. Registrations
have slowed, though, as few desirable, easy-to-type domain names remain
unregistered.
But launching multilingual domain names has not been a smooth process for
VeriSign. When the company announced last fall that it was testing the new
multilingual domain name technology, it elicited protests from some members of
ICANN, the global governing body overseeing domain name policies, who said they
had not been properly consulted.
Meanwhile, Chinese Internet policy officials, who were introducing their own
version of Web site names in Chinese, accused VeriSign of infringing upon its
national rights. The Chinese system allowed the entire domain name, including
the ".com" portion, to be written in Chinese, which they claimed was
superior to VeriSign's system, which leaves the suffix - i.e. ".com",
".net", and ".org" - in English. The issue appears to have
been settled by the two parties.
Rare languages now receive support
Users can now register and pay for the domain names, which will be priced
about $30 per year - about the same as English-language domain names, according
to VeriSign spokesman, Brian O'Shaughnessy. He said there was no set date for
when the new Web domains would go live.
But Register.com Inc. said it had already registered "thousands" of
the new domains starting over the weekend, according to spokeswoman Shonna
Keogan.
In late March, Internet users will be able to begin registering domain names
in Southeast Asian languages such as Lao, Thai and Tibetan. In late April,
VeriSign will begin taking applications for registrants of Web domains in
several Middle Eastern languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew.
(C) Reuters Limited 2001.