CRI听力:Irish Domain Host Promotes Dot Chinese URLs Online

Reporter: TLD Registry has recently promoted a paid application of two domain names particularly in China.

Arto Isokoski, Finnish CEO and Co-Founder of the company explains their intention behind the designs of domain names which are completely made up of Chinese characters.

"Internet is a great way to promote Chinese culture and language across the world. It's kind of removing the final barrier between the Chinese users and Internet content. When we are taking at these website addresses, removing the Standard Typefaces and replacing them with Chinese characters, so after this, every Chinese person can access to Internet with their own native language."

TLD Registry is a pan-European company founded in Ireland, and is one of the many domain name industry leaders.

Now the company's ambition has gone as far as China, which they described as the biggest yet most difficult market for international companies to crack.

In an effort to popularize these top-level domain names in the native Chinese language market, TLD Registry has recently opened its first office in China, at Zhongguancun, a technology hub in Haidian District in Beijing.

Wang Jin is the general manager of TLD Registry, China. He is a native of Beijing, where locals are usually labeled as being able to speak very standard Chinese.

"As we promote two very Chinese domain names, we also propose that applicants use Chinese characters before dot, so that you only need to use Chinese characters. We do this because it would make international companies more recognizable for Chinese consumers who then wouldn't need to switch to English- language search engine as they do research online."

When Chinese consumers search Baidu or Google for an online product or service, such as "hotels" or "shoes", they use the search term, plus the Chinese word for "online" — the same characters as Dot Chinese Online.

And this has led Arto to believe establishing a website or service with a fully Chinese domain name shows commitment to Chinese consumers, the media and even government regulators, a move which quite a few business ventures may opt for.

"For example, we're dividing our customers-restaurants to be small and medium sized businesses, which perhaps have their first-time Internet process. And we think that in that case, Chinese companies naturally think about Chinese website addresses if having an awareness of the Chinese language websites. And then of course, there are domain name investors, who are buying some good domain names and maybe selling them after some period of time. And when this is going to happen, they understand there's an after market and creates business opportunities for everybody."

Arto also advocates that fully-Chinese domain names have other advantages. For example, fully-Chinese URLs may greatly help consumer protection against phishing attacks.

Chinese netizens favor fully-Chinese web addresses because it's easier to spot phishing URLs when they're in Chinese.

To date, there are almost 600 million Chinese netizens in the country.

For Studio Plus, I'm Xu Fei.