NeuStar, Inc. announced that it has deployed internationalized domain names (IDNs) for both the Chinese and the Japanese languages in the .BIZ top- level Internet domain. Interested registrants will be able to secure .BIZ domain names using these characters as of April 21, 2007.

.BIZ IDNs enable companies and for-profit organizations worldwide to register domain names in their languages of choice. NeuStar has offered .BIZ IDNs in Spanish, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish since November 2006, and in German since 2004.

NeuStar’s Chinese and Japanese IDN offerings make available more than 19,000 Han and 178 Katakana and Hiragana characters, which are commonly used in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, and in Chinese and Japanese communities around the world. The complete Chinese and Japanese language tables can be found online.

“China and Japan are two of the world’s largest markets for IDNs, and BIZ is the first global domain to implement Chinese and Japanese IDNs in a manner that fully respects the linguistic cultures of both language groups,” commented Richard Tindal, vice president of domain name services at NeuStar. “With IDNs becoming more prevalent, we expect that .BIZ will become an essential component of every savvy international company’s media mix, particularly among firms with large Chinese- and Japanese-speaking customer bases. Because .BIZ is a generic TLD, it is global in scope, and can reach businesses that operate in these languages anywhere around the world.”

NeuStar’s Chinese and Japanese IDN offerings in .BIZ not only help protect intellectual property rights and brand consistency through the bundling of like names, but also mitigate homographic and “spoofing” attacks across the two widely-used language groups, which share a large repertoire of Han characters. Further, NeuStar’s solution reinforces the company’s commitment to adhere to the recommendations put forth by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the China Network Information Center (CNNIC), Japan Registry Service Co. Ltd. (JPRS) and the Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC).

All IDN names in .BIZ can be registered in one- to 10-year increments, and will be available on a “first come, first served” basis from accredited .BIZ registrars. IDNs in .BIZ work in all major Web browsers including Internet Explorer 7, Firefox and Safari.