Thursday, May 23, 2002

asia suffers from realnames shutdown

There's been considerable US media coverage about the shutdown of RealNames Corp lately. One aspect of the closing that hasn't been the focus of many of those stories is the impact upon asian web sites. The internet's domain name system can't handle asian characters. RealNames was enabling people to use keywords in asian characters to find those sites. Should the domain name system be changed to recognize other alphabets? Or should private businesses continue to address that issue? The CEO of RealNames is concerned that Microsoft might be the company that tries to fill the void in Asia that the closing of RealNames will leave.