The company is also holding talks with China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) in the hope of bringing about a Chinese domain name system that would be universally compatible with other systems, the CEO of i-DNS.net Mr Michael Ng revealed.
Users can use Chinese domain names on their IE 5.x browsers so long as they have installed a plug-in known as iClient, which can be downloaded from the company’s website. Developments in Chinese DNS started last year and currently there are three major systems. VeriSign is the ICANN-accredited registry for domain names suffixed with .com, .net and .org; and is now offering domain names in the format of “
.com”, “.net” and “.org” based on its foundations.
China’s CNNIC, however, is offering Chinese domain names in the format “.
”, “
”, “
” and “
”; which are similar to those as offered by i-DNS.net.
VeriSign and i-DNS.net announced partnership
VeriSign had also announced a partnership with i-DNS.net whereby the latter’s technology shall be employed for the internationalization of domain names. Mr Ng said that there is not much of a compatibility problem between .com and domain names. The joint service offered by the partners saw a total of 920,000 domain names registered, of which 80% are Chinese domain names. The system supports Simplified and Traditional Chinese scripts; and on top of that, lends support to other 60 languages including Korean, Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew and eight Indian languages. Currently domain name registration services have been offered for more than 30 languages.
In recent months a registrar in Seattle operating the [.cc] top level domain has begun its quest to dominate 15% of the Chinese domain name market. It has commissioned Dotcc in Malaysia as its Asian representative, whom in turn had roped in the efforts of sohu.com, Secure Site Technologies (set up by Hong Kong movie star Andy Lau) and Taiwanese peacead.com to jointly tap the Chinese market.
.cc even publicized its reservation service: should a user register a Chinese domain name, .cc shall ensure that the registered name shall remain unique even for languages like Japanese or Korean. In other words, should the domain name “.cc” be registered as a Chinese domain name, it will remain closed for registration for even in Japanese and Korean despite the fact that both these languages had scripts looking like “” in their separate written system.
Mr Ng said that .cc is employing i-DNS.net’s technology.
He added that for ccTLDs (country coded top level domain) like .cn and .jp would have no problems if China and Japan employed their own individual system; however for .com domain names there would most certainly be confusion.
Non-standardization of systems lead to the problem of confusion as the Internet gateway has no way of distinguishing between CNNIC’s GB domain name “” and i-DNS.net’s GB domain name of “”.
Mr Ng said that i-DNS.net’s technology is built upon UNICODE; therefore, when it encounters the case where all three languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) had their own version of “”, it will refer to the separate UNICODE encoding of “
” and “
” in each language to determine which is the version requested by the user.
Talking about future development, Mr Ng said, “the company shall move towards working with ISPs to offer multilingual domain name registration. Currently i-DNS.net has about 30 registrars in Beijing, Shanghai and Canton alone, 4 in Japan and a total of 7 in Korea. The registrars are all native.
Lycosasia and Speednames are the two Chinese domain name registrars in Singapore for VeriSign and ii-DNS.net. The annual registration fee for each Chinese domain name is US$35.
Mr Ng also said that in the case of duplication of domain names, both involved parties shall have to produce documented proof to stake their claims. Should both claims be legitimate, then the domain name in question shall be allocated on a first come first serve basis.
He also said, “native registrars understand the local market best. They know of the taboos in their sphere of operation and can prevent registration of domain names that are offending or tortuous in nature.
He also said, “i-DNS.net does not allow users to register country names as domain names. The company also respects the wishes of governments and shall deactivate any domain names should they make a complaint.”
i-DNS.net is established in October 1999 through investment from General Atlantic Partners. Its staff strength is more than 80, with more than 60 of which operating research and development projects at its Asian office in Singapore. Its headquarters is in Palo Alto, California; and has offices in Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul. APNG and the National University of Singapore developed the company’s multilingual domain name technology after 2 years of research.
-- Translated Article
