An ad hoc process by the Chinese government last month led to an erroneous rumor that China was setting up a rival .com domain to the authoritative international domain. In fact, though the characters typed after the dot mean simply "company", the Chinese DNS servers translate this to .com.cn inside China's Internet space and so do not conflict with .com.

Cerf is encouraged by the cooperation shown among the governments and communities of countries with similar or overlapping character sets, such as China, Japan and Korea, or Hindi, Urdu and Parsee speakers.

A temporary test top-level domain will be set up this year to verify that systems using the two schemes -- known as Dname and NS Records -- work as expected, Cerf says. Then procedures for using and managing such names will have to be devised.

"Once you publicize the availability of such names, people will immediately want to start registering names, and as a registrar, you will need to have amended your procedures."

Cerf declines to give a date for general availability of international names. "Rules will be established and some testing done by the end of this year. This, I hope, will stimulate the rest of the user community at least to begin thinking through [amended processes]."