<nettime> Asia and domain names, etc. (@)

[Marsha.Woodbury.cpsr-global@egroups.com]

NewsScan Daily,  9 November 2000 ("Above The Fold")

ASIAN-LANGUAGE DOMAIN NAMES NOW ACCEPTED

VeriSign, the company in charge of dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org Internet
domain names will today begin accepting Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
characters for those suffixes, an action expected to dramatically
accelerate Internet globally. Arabic and other non-English languages will
be added later. Doug Wolford, the general manager of Network Solutions
Inc., VeriSign's registration arm, said: "There's a whole world out there
that has really not been able to use the Web. Hundreds of millions of
people have to use English to find their native language Web site. It's an
absurdity, an artifact of history long outgrown." (AP/San Jose Mercury
News 9 Nov 2000)
http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/085037.htm

INTERNET SOCIETY WARNS AGAINST MULTILINGUAL DOMAIN NAMES

The Internet Society has warned that proceeding with the sale of
multilingual domain names will harm the stability of the Internet Domain
Name System, and asked that the initiative be postponed until the Internet
Engineering Task Force can develop a proposed standard for
internationalized domain names. Internet Society VP David Maher admits
that it's unusual for the group to issue such a strongly worded statement.
"This is very significant... We think this will absolutely hurt the DNS
and inevitably lead to conflicts as people claim to have the rights to
certain names because of this test bed... Real problems come from the fact
that there are conflicting proposals for how internationalized domain
names should be handled. This automatically ensures there will be serious
problems. It's like different companies selling telephone numbers or seats
on the same flight." (Infoworld.com 8 Nov 2000)
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/11/08/001108hnmultilingual.xml




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