MARINA DEL RAY, Calif., - PRNewswire - Just days before the annual meeting here of the international organization ICANN, which coordinates the technical operation of the Internet, a new technology company,
Internet Driver, Inc. (IDI), has announced a breakthrough technology which will allow Internet users from around the world to use their native language to access the entire Internet. Representatives of IDI plan to discuss this
new technology at a November 13, 2000 workshop, part of the
ICANN meeting, which will be focusing on ways to extend the operation of the
Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) to character sets other than ASCII (the only character set currently supported) such as Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, the Scandinavian languages, and
Spanish. The workshop is being conducted by the IETF working group for
Internationalized Domain Name, whose goal is to specify the requirements for
internationalized access to domain names and to specify a standards track protocol based on the requirements.
Speaking for IDI, Steve Klein, who will be participating in the ICANN meeting and IETF workshop, explained the innovations IDI has developed:
“Rather than simply convert foreign character domain names into an otherwise meaningless unicode string, the IDI system meaningfully translates the phrases, words, and phonetic characters, from a users language into English, from English into a users language, or between any other combination
of languages incorporated into the system.”
“Moreover, the IDI system translates all foreign characters into English before making the URL query to the DNS, therefore eliminating the need
for any modification to the current DNS whatsoever,” Klein explained.
Since the IDI system produces linguistically meaningful results between all languages in any Internet interaction, it is the only system that provides the following functionality for both web-surfers and web sites:
1) Universal access - Any user in any language can access any currently existing web page or e-mail address using any foreign character set;
2) Integration - Complete two-way integration between any two languages. Any user can access any future web page or e-mail address registered in any language using any character set, and the URL displayed by the IDI system will be in their native language;
3) Foreign Character Registration - IDI’s system accommodates registration of foreign character URLs that in turn completely integrate with the existing Internet infrastructure. This makes
foreign character URLs immediately accessible to an English speaking user.  Moreover, IDI’s system enables foreign character URL’s to be as many characters as the registrant desires.
4) E-mail - IDI’s system allows all foreign registered URL’s to create unlimited foreign character e-mail accounts in their web site.  These e-mail addresses also fully integrate with the existing DNS infrastructure, facilitating e-mail communication between any two
users in any two languages.
5) Domain name registration - IDI’s system eliminates the need for re-registration of domain names. Existing web sites with domain names registered with the VeriSign Registry do not have to re-register their name in any or all foreign languages because all existing web sites will be immediately accessible in any language with the IDI
system.
6) Native language utilization - IDI’s system permits top-level domains(e.g., .com, .org, .net) to be written in native language characters instead of Latin characters as required by the VeriSign/I-DNS testbed
currently being evaluated.
7) Subsite directory translation - The IDI system’s coherent sub-site
directory translation allows for easy sub-site creation, and the ability to use sub-site’s in URL’s in any language to directly access
any specific web page.  Because of IDI’s unique technology providing
meaningful translation of sub-site directories, the Internet
infrastructure community will not have to adopt new standards that may otherwise be required to support other proposed approaches.
The IETF working group for Internationalized Domain Names has declared
that “Fundamental requirement in this work is to not disturb the current use and operation of the domain name system, and for the DNS to continue to allow any system anywhere to resolve any domain name.” Consistent with that goal, the IDI system converts all foreign characters into English before
interacting with the DNS, and therefore causes no modification or disruption
to the DNS system whatsoever. It allows any system anywhere to resolve any domain name regardless of the language the name was registered in or what character set is used to access the site. The IDI system ably fulfills the
IETF “fundamental requirement.”
Commenting on the IETF process, IDI’s Steve Klein said: “We look forward
to participating in the activities of the Working Group, and explaining our
new process - for which a patent is pending. We welcome the Working Group’s
careful analysis of our solution and comparison with other offerings. IDI is
excited about our potential role in truly internationalizing the Internet.”
——-