Home Service Background Development of the Internet Address

The Internet Address is the name of the location of a website. Anyone who needs to browse a website needs a specific Internet Address to go to. More than two decades have passed since the invention of the IP address that paved the way for the commercialization of the Internet. From numbers, the Internet Address has evolved to comprehensible English words, then the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) system made it possible to use some multilingual characters in the Internet Address.

IP Address Each host connected to Internet has a unique address (IP address). IPv4 expresses the 32bit IP address in decimal numbers divided by ".". Decimal 210.103.175.41 It is difficult to memorize IP address of binary or decimal numbers. And in case of important servers such as web server and mail server, IP address can be changed depending on the network environment or corporate environment. For this reason, the easily-memorable English words are used, mapped to the IP address. If 128bit IPv6 is deployed in the near future, it will be more difficult to memorize the IP address. Domain Names Due to inconvenience of IP address, people started to use the names representing the entities or hosts. The host names used on /etc/hosts file in the early stage were developed to introduce the domain names with hierarchical structure. It gave greater convenience than IP addresses. Domain is made in English, and each hierarchy is divided with '.' as in case of IP address. Domain names are made with 'English', numeric figures, and a special letter '-'. Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Internet was started from USA, but is now widely used around the world. Due to inconvenience of using English, growing numbers of countries show interest in developing Native Language Internet Address. IDN is actively studied mainly by the countries where the ASCII code is not used. However, it is still difficult to support multi languages in the existing DNS and to implement multi languages in the existing hierarchical structure. Combining multi languages with English requires the user to press the language conversion key. In addition, because local characters are converted into the ACE code in the existing IDN, the name server must convert the local character into the ACE code at every addition, change and deletion of zone file.

Now for the next generation Internet Address, there are no more language limitations in the Internet Address. There are no more hierarchies to deal with; for example, there's no need for www, .com, .net, etc. That's totally better! Now the Internet Address can completely be in any language. That means non-English users do not have to memorize ambiguous letters and numbers to type on the Internet Address bar. This is the future of the Internet Address, and it's been delivered to the world by Netpia, Inc.