Last month ICANN announced, they would reach out and accept applications for domain names to be made available in foreign languages. And now its official that the world would see Internet addresses completely in their regional language, as Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has finally approved the use of domain names in Hindi and 15 other languages, which are not based on Roman/Latin characters. The scheduled launch of Indian domain names is expected to happen as soon as June 2010.
It won’t be soon that we would have domain names in local languages. Hindi being the national language of billions of people the new system would catch up fast and is bound to spread at a very faster rate. Making this work is a technical aspect and Domain Name Systems would understand the different non-Latin scripts and act as the web translators for us.
To make the domain system work efficiently in India, a series of National Workshops on International Domain Names(IDN) were launched with the first workshop in Pune. Similar workshops would be organised at major centres like Kolkata and Punjab in December 2009 and January 2010 respectively to provide a platform to all major players.
‘Increased awareness of the problems and perspectives of IDN will provide useful feedback for finalizing the policy.’ The culmination of these discussions would be held in an International Conference to be held in Delhi in February 2010.
The awareness workshop for availability of domain names in Indian languages, was an effort of the DIT, Govt of India, C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advances Computing) and NIXI (National Internet Exchange of India) – the designated registry in Domain Names.
Asian countries show wide potential for economic and technological growth, non-latin domains surely would take time to get acquainted with but the penetration rate of this could be very fast. This would be a step towards making Internet local and would surely revolutionize the only English Internet.
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