India: Govt To Increase Vernacular grip On Net (.in)

[companyone]

NEW DELHI: In a fresh move to Indianise the web, the government is planning to have vernacular domain names. This means that ‘dot in’ domain names that link to the vernacular website can also be in vernacular languages. As of now the ‘dot in’ registry has to offer only english domain names.

“While there are websites with Indian language content, one is yet to see a web address in Hindi or Tamil,” said an IT ministry official. “We are working on a mechanism to enable a user to have his domain name in the language of his choice,” he added. The ministry through the National Internet eXchange of India (NIXI) offers ‘dot in’ domain names to the public. The vernacular domain names will also be available with NIXI.

“To enable this, the web portal has to be positioned for local language characters,” the official said. The department of information technology (DIT) in association with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is preparing a variant table for characters of various Indian languages. “The pilot project to enable this mechanism will be carried out in 2007,” the official said. The pricing of the vernacular domain names will be chalked out once the projects are in progress.

This is the IT ministry’s second move to enable net surfing in vernacular languages for Indians. The ministry is also preparing a web-based software that will act as a search engine seamlessly running across all the prominent Indian language scripts. For instance, a Punjabi looking for some information that is available only on Tamil script can use the software to prowl the web and get the needed info back in Gurmukhi, translated from the Tamil one.

 

[Gerry]

You will start seeing more and more of this now and in the very near future. India and China account for the largest populations on earth.

With the acceptance and many compliant browsers, you will also start seeing more and more use of IDN's.

China and India can and will control their own destinies and languages. They know they have the power to go against the grain and make the web what they want it to be. And it does not necessarily have to be in a .com manner.

China wants and will get more .cn registrations than .com. Is it any surprise that they are practically giving away the .cn domain registration?

Look for China to also start insisting more and more usage of the .cn. China is attempting to convince its people and the rest of the world that it can control .cn servers where it can not control .com. They are claiming that recent earthquake activity has caused outages of the internet beyond their control and the loss of tens of thousands of dot coms. It vows this will not happen with .cn.

India, with a population of 1 billion (second to China), four times the US population also appears to perhaps be following in China's footsteps.

Like it or not, these two economic powerhouses may change the look and the atmosphere of the internet in just a couple of years.

 

[DomainLobe]

To me this reinforces the utility of NNN as a universal language.
Any language / browser can be applied as the future evolves.

 

[Gerry]

If I am correct in assuming, you are referring to universal acceptance and meaning of numbers.

If this is the case, I have been a believer of this for numerous years. While some languages may have a different script for numbers, numerals as we use them are known worldwide and mean the same thing.