Singapore Network Information Center (SGNIC), a subsidiary of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), announced that it started offering, as a part of a six-month trial, Chinese or Tamil ’.sg’ domain names for individuals as well as organizations. These domain names will actually be in Chinese or Tamil characters.
The six-month trial, which was launched by SGNIC for multilingual domain names on July 4, will end on January 3, 2006. The trial is open to individuals and organizations in Singapore and overseas.
SGNIC notes that 92 percent of the world’s population is non-native speakers of the English language. As such, Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) offer users a more direct means of reaching their Chinese-speaking and Tamil-speaking constituents both in Singapore and abroad.
"SGNIC is pleased to be the first national domain name registry in the world to offer Tamil IDNs for trial," said Mr. Lim Choon Sai, general manager of SGNIC.
IDNs will have a ’.idn.sg’ extension to the web address so as not to affect the current ’.sg’ domain names zone.