[Sydney, AUSTRALIA] Melbourne IT will attempt to boost its flagging share price in the face of
impending competition in the .com.au domain name market the launch of a new
service, multilingual.com.
The service enables the prefix characters in a domain name to be written in
the language of the country of origin and combines this with the suffix
‘.com.’ The company commenced registrations for domain names using Chinese,
Japanese and Korean characters on November 10, 2000.
INWW said the service would initially operate as a “test bed” registration
and names registered should be considered provisional. The VeriSign Global
Registry is working with the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) for the
full development of standards relating to multilingual domain naming. INWW
acknowledged that it is possible that “a very small number” of names may
become invalid as standards are developed. The registry has also advised
INWW that resolution of domain names will not be available at this stage,
meaning that although a name can be registered, it cannot be used as a
locator for the Internet. “The issue of resolution will be addressed by the
registry shortly,” according to INWW.
Clive Flory, president international at INWW said “key generic words in each
of the languages, as well as lucky numbers and combinations thereof, will be
available in these new markets.”
Mr. Flory said that in addition to the pure Chinese character domain name
service that began in October (with both prefix and suffix characters in
Chinese), the company “now offers a comprehensive suite of multilingual
domain name services. In fact,” he claimed, “Melbourne IT will be the first
registrar to offer ‘multilingual.com’ registration services, in addition to
the pure character domain name registration services, currently available in
Chinese.”
This announcement follows VeriSign Global Registry’s decision to open its
multilingual domain name registry on November 10, 2000.
“The registration service will help further develop the adoption of the
Internet amongst these non-English speaking markets and enable businesses
from these countries to present their company name and brand in Internet
addresses in their own language. Furthermore it will enable individuals to
have their personal e-mail address in the language of their choice,” said
Mr. Flory.
