NSI Will Support Asian Language Domain Names

Names in other languages besides English will be available in following months.

Simone Kaplan, Medill News Service

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Network Solutions is making the Web just a bit more worldwide by offering domain names in three Asian languages by the end of October. Domain names will be available in other Eastern and Western European languages within the next year.

The program, a first in Internet history, will enable multinational companies to expand communications into the Asian-Pacific region, where Internet usage is growing at an exponential rate, and reach millions of potential customers around the world.

Pricing will be announced later this month. New names will be available in November, one month after the program goes live.

At a news conference here, Network Solutions officials outlined a program in which everything to the left of.com,.net, or.org can be registered in Korean, Japanese, and either simplified or traditional Chinese. Until now, all.com,.net, and.org domain names have been available only in Roman characters or numbers, forcing many Asians to use numeric domain names that are easier to remember.

"The Web will never look the same," says Douglas Wolford, general manager and senior vice president of NSI Registrar, Network Solutions' Internet identity service. "It hasn't been a true World Wide Web until now. People have had to jump through hoops to make the Internet work for them. No longer."

The program will open up all existing domain names to foreign users. For example, business.com could now be registered in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. The potential implications of creating a new set of domain names are far-reaching. Industry analysts anticipate that multinational corporations will be first to protect their brand names.

Asian Registrations Increase

Even with the language barrier, Internet users in Asian countries have been registering domain names faster than anywhere else. In Korea, a country with 10 million active Internet users, domain registration has increased 169 percent within the last six months, according to NSI. Domain registration in Japan is up 115 percent from the last six months of 1999.

Within the next six months, NSI plans to offer domain names in Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese, Wolford says.

"The amount of Internet real estate is about to multiply dramatically," he said. "There's going to be a truly global land rush when these new names open up."

If other domain registry companies want to offer Asian-language names, they must meet specifications set by VeriSign, which recently bought NSI, company officials say. (See "VeriSign Acquires Network Solutions." )

Network Solutions plans to offer a package of translation services, and will let you register up to 100 domain names at once. The company said it will place at least one customer service representative in each country to offer support in the local language.

Network Solutions will accept registrations on a first-come, first-served basis. Customers can register through NSI's Web site, or through NSI's idNames service, which manages multiple domain names for corporate users. Foreign customers can register through one of NSI's Asian partner companies.