VeriSign criticised over accents and foreign characters

Domain name registrar VeriSign has come up against a wall of criticism over plans to launch domain names containing special characters.

The system, which will enable non-English/ASCII characters to be included in domain names, has been attacked by industry watchers who warn that the use of such characters currently has no standard classification. Companies are being advised to wait for verification from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) before paying for such internet addresses. Currently, a domain with special characters must first be converted into a normal character string without special characters. As yet, there is no industry standard for this conversion and normal browsers without additional installations are unable to recognise such domain names.