At least some Indian language scripts may start appearing in internet domain names next year, effectively ending the country’s monopoly of English over the internet. The process of finalizing the necessary rule sets for 22 Indian languages identified by the Government of India was progressing in this direction, say the Indian officials involved in this exercise.
The move aims to facilitate the entry of millions of people who do not know English into the country’s Internet service. The country already ranks second in terms of Internet users, behind China.
“Next year, I hope, at least a few of these 22 languages will be seen appearing in the domain names,” Samiran Gupta, head of India at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN), said on Wednesday.
The work on the multilingual internet involving neo-Brahmi scripts such as Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, etc., has been ongoing at C-DAC(Center for Development of Advanced Computing). According to him, the rule sets being created for each of these language scripts will soon be put out for public feedback before being introduced for writing internet domain names.
However, this would only be a partial achievement for putting the Indian language scripts on a par with English, Chinese, or Russian, among other languages whose scripts were universally accepted in creating Internet domain names with them. According to Gupta, what will follow after this is the creation of e-mail IDs in those language scripts and their universal acceptance across e-mail service providers.
ICANN is holding its 57th meeting in Hyderabad from November 3-9, 2016, amidst India-backed efforts to embrace Indian language scripts and set a stage for expanding the Internet user base much faster in the country.
Announcing the agenda and topics of the upcoming ICANN meeting on Wednesday, Rahul Gosain, Director, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MeitY), stated that India will add almost half of the world’s 1 billion new Internet users due to these and other efforts by the Government of India.
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This is the second time India has been hosting the meeting of the internet body, which held its 31st meeting in India in February 2008. The present conference assumes a particular significance by being the first meeting ahead of the transition of Internet governance into a multi-stakeholder community model from the stewardship of the US Government. ICANN is expected to evolve the new form of Internet governance at its Hyderabad meeting, which the Telangana government is co-hosting.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, ICANN president and CEO Goran Marby will attend the formal inaugural session on November 5. The Ministry official said that MeitY’s mission was to promote inclusivity and sustainable growth of electronics, enhance India’s role in Internet governance, and improve efficiency through digital services and secure cyberspace.
ICANN Asia Pacific vice president and managing director Jia-Rong Low said some of the topics that will be discussed at the Hyderabad meeting include Internet governance, enhancing ICANN’s accountability, ongoing work on multilingual internet, in particular the Neo-Brahmi scripts, and updates on the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program.
