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VeriSign, the Internet registration and certification company, will provide two new services allowing Internet users to enter domain names using Chinese characters.

The Web-based Navigation and i-Nav are internationalised domain name (IDN) services that will give Internet users a choice of 350 languages for choosing domain names ending in .com or .net.

Christopher Parente, IDN communications manager for VeriSign, said millions of non-English speakers would welcome this development.

'Over 75 per cent of the world's 665 million Internet users do not reside in North America but they must still type in ASCII domain names,' he said last week.

As the North American market begins to mature, Asia is seen as the fastest-growing region.

'By 2005, there will be 345 million users in Asia,' he said.

Mr Parente said VeriSign had already made its DNS server farms ready for multilingual usage by installing the Navigation software.

'For the normal user, the I-Nav plug-in can be downloaded from our Web site. As for our 13 server farms throughout the world, we have already made them capable of handling multiple languages,' he said.

Mr Parente described VeriSign's role in the system of DNS servers: 'VeriSign operates the global DNS system through the 13 locations. We also directly operate two of the 13 root servers that serve the Internet, under the auspices of [Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers] Icann.'

Domain names were sometimes viewed as a percentage of the population to give an idea of overall Internet penetration, he said.

'There is a base of 900,000 IDNs. In a mature domain name market like Germany, there are 2.3 domain names to users. For the United States it is 0.1 and China is 0.01. As you can see, for China, there is plenty of room for growth potential,' he said.

Mr Parente said interest in localised domain names varied, particularly over country code top level domains (ccTLDs).

As of the third quarter last year, Germany had 5,737,883 ccTLDs ending in .de and only 1,319,209 ending in .com or .net.

'Hong Kong, however, has 61,703 ccTLDs ending in .hk but 227,370 ending in .com or .net,' he said.

One potential difficulty for VeriSign could have come from conflicting names based on Chinese characters with different meanings in different parts of the Chinese-speaking world. The character airen means a spouse on the mainland, but it means a mistress in Taiwan.

If a Web builder from the mainland wanted to set up a site to discuss marital issues, he might choose the domain name airen.com (using Chinese characters of course). Meanwhile, someone from Taiwan may want to use the same name to write about 'second wives'.

But Mr Parente said the domain would go to the first person or company to register it. 'We shall be very conservative on this and simply work on the first-come, first-served principle.'

Specialised software is required for entering Chinese characters. Proliferation of Chinese character-based domain names could help push some vendors into developing better solutions than are available at present.



VeriSign's  multilingual  options give  users choice