There are currently about one million Vietnamese domain names issued and Viet Nam is among the top countries in terms of internationalised domain name distribution in the world, according to Government portal chinhphu.vn.

The Viet Nam Internet Network Information Centre (VNNIC), in co-operation with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), held a seminar on internationalised domain names in order to disseminate to the Vietnamese community the trend of internationalised domain name development on Wednesday.

Tran Minh Tan, VNNIC director, said that internationalised domain names were indispensable, playing an important role in expressing the national spirit and honoring the native language of each country.

Internationalised domain names enable people around the world to use domain names in local languages and scripts, defined by ICANN on its website. Internationalised domain names are formed using characters from different scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic or Devanagari.

The VNNIC representative also emphasised that we were witnessing a new stage of Internet development with diversified types of services and technologies. Of these, internationalised domain names were trending globally, he said.

With internationalised domain names, Internet users have the chance to use domain names in their own language to access the Internet, which is especially useful for non-Latin speaking countries like Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Russia, Greece and Korea, he said.

Viet Nam’s digital economy has huge potential, said an ICANN representative for the Asia-Pacific region. According to the Internet World Stats report, Viet Nam ranks 17th among nations with the highest Internet penetration, with over 49.7 million people connected to the net, which is a penetration rate of 53 per cent of the population.

VNNIC’s 2016 Internet Resource Report also showed that more than half of businesses in Viet Nam own websites to sell goods online.

“By crossing the language barrier, Internet penetration may increase as more Vietnamese can access the network in their native language,” he said.

Vietnamese domain names were free from April 28, 2011 to December 31 last year. The number of registered domain names reached one million in July 2014 and was maintained at 977,007 by the end of October last year.

From January 1 this year, Vietnamese domain name owners have to pay an annual fee of VND20,000 (nearly US$1) for a domain name in accordance with a circular from the Ministry of Finance.

In addition, from mid-April, customers were allowed to register Vietnamese domain names through domain name registrars. The number of newly-registered Vietnamese domain names through registrars has reached 2,331 since then. - VNS