January 14, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Of the 380,039 multilingual, also known as internationalized, .com and .net domain names registered, Korea accounts for 141,447 of the them, the United States for 84,402 and Japan for 72,193, according to research by Webhosting.Info (webhosting.info), a Web hosting research portal operated by domain registrar Directi.
According to Webhosting.Info, Germany, China and Denmark followed, holding positions 4-6, with Hong Kong, Sweden, Spain and Australia rounding out the top ten. Korea, the United States and Japan accounted for 78 percent of the total multilingual names registered.
Domain names have traditionally been represented in English as ASCII characters. In contrast, internationalized domain names are represented by foreign language characters that include non-ASCII characters.
Internationalized domain names are now available in more than 350 languages, including Korean, Greek, Russian and Chinese, according to Webhosting.info.
In March 2003, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) finalized a set of standards for internationalized domain names. The standards convert foreign language characters into Unicode and then encode these characters in ASCII for transmission over the Internet's DNS.
An agreement has been reached to standardize on what is referred to as "punycode," an ASCII-compatible encoding (ACE) scheme.
