The Internet will become truly ubiquitous in India when the ones living in rural areas can connect with it. Agreed it has the ability to offer a host of extremely useful services from weather forecasts to commodity prices, but unless this information is delivered in a format that’s compatible to them, it won’t serve its purpose. Unless it is delivered in the language that they understand, it won’t do any good. Understanding this, the government had taken a lot of initiatives to promote the use of regional languages on computers and the Internet. A few websites have already come up. Initiatives like Webdunia and AOL’s are worth noting.

Even Indian bloggers have taken to blogging in regional languages.

But what’s all this worth, if, to read content in Hindi, you still have to type w-w-w-dot-webdunia-dot-com, in English? You got the picture.

ICANN, (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the International body deciding on the Internet naming convention is having a meeting in New Delhi on 13-Feberuary-2008, where it will be discussing the possibility to allow domain names in languages other than English. This will enable generic domain names in other languages.

The Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) workshop in New Delhi will be focusing on

·         An introduction to Indian Languages, and Scripts

·         Development of Language Tables, Policy Issues for Indic Scripts

·         Indian Languages in Computer Applications

·         Status of Indian Language Deployment in Operating Systems

·         Status of Indian Language Deployments in Computer Applications

India is already working on regional language domain names on the secondary level. ICANN’s efforts are focused on the inclusion of the regional language domain names on the primary level.

Mr. Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology said

“The Internet has changed the world in the last decade. ICANN has played a key role in the development of the Internet by involving all the stakeholders in establishing various technical standards and delivering a safe, secure, and trustworthy domain name system and IP address system. “ICANN has, in recent years, made significant progress in the performance of core operational activities. This meeting is important to achieve further improvements in such functions”

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