Country NICs and ccTLD holders who have expressed interest as of Dec 1998 include Singapore, Thailand, China, HongKong, Korea and Japan. The current DNS system does not meet the needs of non-English speaking Internet constituents. While this may be realistic and acceptable if the Internet were still confined to the research and academic community, the widespread adoption of Internet is currently hindered by the lack of ability of the current domain name system to support multilingual and multiscript features or Unicode. Owing to the fact that many Asian languages are currently adopting non-Unicode standards that suffer from overlapping codepoint and lack of facility to define the type of encoding used, the ambiguity caused has often been cited as an important reason why it is not a good idea for the current DNS to be internationalized. Localization problems is also cited as another reason why even if the DNS system were able to support an internationalization standard eg Unicode, very few users would be able to use it since each locale would need heavy duty changes to applications to make the whole system work.
Any solution has to deal both problems simultaneously.
The commission also found that other than sporadic and uncoordinated attempts to provide multilingual functionality to the DNS, no comprehensive study or system has been proposed. The commission also finds that besides the need to provision for multilingual multiscript domain names, that there are concurrent needs to be able to render domain name associated addresses such as email address, URLs etc in multilingual scripts. Although currently locked in a difficult impasse, administrative and management solutions to multiple SOAs still poses a major challenge. With a technical solution, such a process of de-monopolisation will be more easily implementatable. Finally, the commission concludes that based on an informal non-quantitative survey of key countries in the region, there are signs of a strong demand for the DNS system to support multilingual scripts.