Melbourne IT has opened the Internet up to domain names for non-English speaking customers, including Chinese, despite reports that the Beijing Government is up in arms over the managing of Chinese domain names by firms outside the mainland.

"China is claiming they have the propriety rights over Chinese characters, it's just like the British government saying it has propriety over the English language," Melbourne IT Product Manager Multi-lingual Domains Kieran Magee said.

"We're providing a commercial service for customers whether they are here or in China."

The Beijing Government has criticised the US Government, saying it has 'no right' to give authorisation to firms to manage domain names with Chinese characters. The government claims firms should be granted permission from Beijing to manage Chinese domain names in mainland China, according to ZDNet Asia.

Beijing's discourse comes after plans by domain name registrar NSI to start the Chinese domain name registration service at the end of last month, in which China's top Internet regulatory body CNNIC, accused them of intruding on China's "sovereignty", the report said.

NSI announced it would delay the launch, however a new date has not been set.

According to ZDNet Asia, Beijing has lodged a formal complaint to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), over the registration of Chinese Domain names.

However, regardless of Beijing's attempts to intervene in plans by firms to use Chinese characters in domain names, Melbourne IT has kicked off today with the assignment of Chinese, Korean and Japanese characters to its 'multi-lingual.com' registration.

The new registration service offers a hybrid of non-Roman characters with the English alphabet, using either .com, .net, or .org.

According to Magee, in the past customers have been forced to use the Roman character alphabet.

"Now they will be able to put company, branding and trading names into their own native language to appeal to their customers."

Warning of a big rush today to register with multi-lingual.com, Magee said it will gradually ease off over the coming weeks as the organisation offers more services to the registrar, such as Thai and Portuguese domain names.

According to a Reuters report, registrars.com has also announced it is moving into the multi-lingual domain name sector, by adding three Asian languages to its registrar, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

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