Domain names in Indian languages to be released soon

Today’s Mint reports domain names in regional languages will be released soon. There has been a talk about this for a while now. It would be interesting to see how the usage of language domain names will pick up in India.

ICANN has cleared India’s application for internationalized domain names (IDNs) in seven languages – Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati. The approval is a two-step process,

Step 1: string evaluation—tests whether the domain names being sought are unique to a country and not in use by other nations. It needs to be unique across the world.

Step 2: test the stability and security of the IDNs

All regional language domain names will end with .bharat extension. One can even get an English domain name ending with .bharat, time for domain squatters to hijack your domain. Most of the good .in domains have been blocked from Europe.

Regional language domain names are expected to boost the usage of language content. The main reason could be the surfer may not be English literate, due to which he can read only if the domain name is written in his/her language. Only 10% of India’s 1.1 billion population knows English. So these IDNs are catering to the majority of India, and so is Oneindia.in 🙂

India was the 5th country to get its currency symbol. Currently, 9 countries have IDNs – UAE, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt, Thailand, Arabic (Palestinian, Tunisia, Jordan), Sri Lanka (in Tamil – will it clash with Indian Tamil?)

• Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)