Have a customer that needs a domain name registered in Hebrew, Gujarati, or Cherokee? Register.com is pre-registering new multi-lingual domain names now.

by ISP-Planet Staff [March 30, 2001]

Domain registrar Register.com, Inc. this week said it would begin taking pre-registration requests for new multi-lingual domain names in Middle-Eastern, Indian and specialized Asian languages, as well as other characters and symbols. Customers can get in line early for the latest and final wave of multi-lingual domain names scheduled to launch in 22 distinct character sets—including Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Gujarati and Vietnamese.

Test put to bed
As a participant of a multi-lingual testbed, Register.com will be among some of the first registrars to provide multi-lingual registration for specialized character domains. Through the VeriSign Global Partner Network, Register.com multi-lingual services can be completed in real time at its Web site.

Preregistrations for the newest multi-lingual domain names will be taken immediately and then be submitted for processing when the service goes live at the registry level on April 5. If the domain name is available for registration at the point of submission, customers will be billed $30 per name.

David Hirschler, Register.com vice president of global marketing, said the launch of its multi-lingual domain name services creates a great opportunity for businesses and individuals because the languages introduced have fundamentally different characters than what has previously been recognized by the domain name system.

"By introducing domains that genuinely reflect the Internet's global user base, we hope to reach out to some of the world's fastest-growing online markets by providing domain names that accurately represent their local culture and clientele," Hirschler said.

All the colors of a rainbow
Middle-Eastern, Indian and specialized Asian domain names are the final installment of Register.com's staggered multi-lingual domain name rollout, which began in November 2000 with the launch of domain registration services in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. During the final phase of the registration program, domain name registrations will be available for all Unicode characters, a widely used standard that allows computers to display non-ASCII characters.

In addition to the languages mentioned, the most recent multi-lingual registration offerings will include: Thai, Sinhala, Tamil, Mongolian, Telugu, Malayalam, Ethiopic, Cherokee, Canadian Aboriginal, Kannada, Thaana, Oriya, Punjabi, Tibetan, Bengali, Myanmar, Lao, Kmer, Syriac and Symbols.

While the existing Domain Name System (DNS) recognizes only ASCII characters, multi-lingual domain registrations are made possible through a technology that translates non-Roman characters into ASCII-compatible representations for the purposes of routing multi-lingual names through the existing DNS. While domain registrations will be processed in real time, domains are only anticipated to resolve to IP addresses on the Internet in the coming months, with the assistance of iClient v3.0 free plug-in software.

As with other .com, .net and .org domains, Register.com's multi-lingual domain name service will process requests on a first-come, first-serve basis.

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