National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) Offers Free Domain in Local Indian Languages

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) announced that it will offer a free IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) in any of their preferred 22 official Indian language along with every IN domain booked by the registrant. Applicant will also get a free email in local language. This offer has been created to stimulate the adoption of भारत (IDN) domain name and proliferation of local language content.

This offer is valid for new .in users who register up to 31st January 2021. This offer is also extended to those existing in users who renew their domain in the month of January 2021.

About NIXI

National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is a not for profit organization working since 2003 for spreading the internet technology to the citizens of India through the following activities: -

i) Internet Exchanges through which the internet data is exchanged amongst ISPs and between ISPs and CDNs.

ii) IN Registry, managing and operation of IN country code domain and भारत IDN domain for India.

iii) IRINN, managing and operating Internet protocol (IPv4/IPv6).

Internet Grows to 359.8 Mn Domain Name Registrations in 3rd Qtr of 2019

VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), a global provider of domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, today announced that the third quarter of 2019 closed with 359.8 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 5.1 million domain name registrations, or 1.4 percent, compared to the second quarter of 2019.1,2 Domain name registrations have grown by 17.4 million, or 5.1 percent, year over year.1,2.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of 157.4 million domain name registrations in the domain name base3 at the end of the third quarter of 2019, an increase of 1.3 million domain name registrations, or 0.8 percent, compared to the second quarter of 2019. The .com and .net TLDs had a combined increase of 5.7 million domain name registrations, or 3.8 percent, year over year. As of Sept. 30, 2019, the .com domain name base totaled 144.0 million domain name registrations, while the .net domain name base totaled 13.4 million domain name registrations.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 9.9 million at the end of the third quarter of 2019, compared to 9.5 million domain name registrations at the end of the third quarter of 2018.

Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide internet users throughout the world with statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry. The third quarter 2019 Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at Verisign.com/DNIB.

About Verisign

Verisign, a global provider of domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, enables internet navigation for many of the world’s most recognized domain names. Verisign enables the security, stability, and resiliency of key internet infrastructure and services, including providing root zone maintainer services, operating two of the 13 global internet root servers, and providing registration services and authoritative resolution for the .com and .net top-level domains, which support the majority of global e-commerce. To learn more about what it means to be Powered by Verisign.

Internet Grows to 351.8 Million Domain Name Registrations in the 1st Quarter of 2019

VeriSign, Inc., a global provider of domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, today announced that the first quarter of 2019 closed with 351.8 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 3.1 million domain name registrations, or 0.9 percent, compared to the fourth quarter of 2018.1,2 Domain name registrations have grown by 18.0 million, or 5.4 percent, year over year.1,2

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of 154.8 million domain name registrations in the domain name base3 at the end of the first quarter of 2019, an increase of 1.8 million domain name registrations, or 1.2 percent, compared to the fourth quarter of 2018. The .com and .net TLDs had a combined increase of 6.5 million domain name registrations, or 4.4 percent, year over year. As of March 31, 2019, the .com domain name base totaled 141.0 million domain name registrations, while the .net domain name base totaled 13.8 million domain name registrations.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 9.8 million at the end of the first quarter of 2019, compared to 9.6 million domain name registrations at the end of the first quarter of 2018.

Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide internet users throughout the world with statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry. The first quarter 2019 Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at Verisign.com/DNIBIndia.

About Verisign

Verisign, a global provider of domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, enables internet navigation for many of the world’s most recognized domain names. Verisign enables the security, stability, and resiliency of key internet infrastructure and services, including providing root zone maintainer services, operating two of the 13 global internet root servers, and providing registration services and authoritative resolution for the .com and .net top-level domains, which support the majority of global e-commerce. To learn more about what it means to be Powered by Verisign

Soon Internet Domains to be Available in 22 Indian Regional Languages Scripts

Son you can see and own website domain names in your own regional language as global internet body ICANN is working on a proposal to enable booking of website names in non-English languages including Indian scripts starting with Devanagari, Gurmukhi and Gujarati.

ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a global multi-stakeholder organization responsible for IP address space allocation, has been on a new task to support domain names in numerous languages spoken in India, including the 22 scheduled languages of the country.

ICANN India head Samiran Gupta said, “Work is on for nine Indian scripts – Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. These scripts are expected to cover many different local languages."

A Neo-Brāhmī Generation Panel (NBGP), set up under ICANN, has started consultation to enable registeration of website name extension, technically called top level domain (TLD), like .com, .net, .in, in the three Indian scripts.

The Neo-Brāhmī group is so named to cover all such scripts used today and which are based on Brāhmī scrpit, which is an ancestor of all scripts used to write modern Indo-Aryan languages in Southeast Asia including Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer (in South-East Asia), and others in Central Asia.

In October last year, ICANN began “IDN Variant TLDs” initiative with six generation panels, based on specific scripts from major writing systems -- Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, CJK, Arabic and Devanagari.

The technical standards once freezed through the process, called Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone (RZ-LGR), will allow people to use any word of their choice as TLD in the Indian scripts.

"After integration in root zone of these LGR's people from all over world will be able to apply for top level domains in these scripts. This means that internet domains will be possible for public at large in names of there choice and make internet access in there own language," NGBP Chairperson co-chair and Data XGen Plus founder and CEO, Ajay Data told .

Also Read - From 1st Oct'16 The US Will Lose Its Authority Over Internet’s Naming System

The root zone are the main servers that convert name of website in digital form and identify address of server where the website is hosted to connect visitors of online portals. These servers are managed by the not-for-profit organisation ICANN.

While there are nine scripts in works at ICANN, NBGP intends to publish the proposals for the developing technical standards for all nine in three sets starting with Devanagari, Gurmukhi, and Gujarati.

At present website name with extension .bharat can be booked only in Devanagari script which has limited letters that are identified by internet servers.

In 2014, Indian government launched Dot Bharat (.भारत) domain in Devanagari script. The domain has been launched for non-English speaking people, and will cover eight languages like Hindi, Dogri, Bodo, Maithili, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali and Sindhi.

At present you can also search content in the regional language on Google. But, the effort from ICANN is to also enable the domain name in the local language that will make the existing process easier and would also enable the system to publish regional language content that is being searched by the users.

Notably, Devanagari was representative of the Brāhmī family scripts and is currently used for 11 out of 22 official languages of India (Boro/Bodo, Dogri, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Santhali and Sindhi).

In 2016, ICANN introduced .Google, .Apple, .ibm, and other branded internet addresses.

In the same year, India's state-owned telecom operatoe BSNL introduced free E-Mail Address service in 8 Indian Languages to its broadband users by launching a ‘DataMail’ service. Now BSNL broadband users will be able to open an email ID in DataMail service in their own language.

Via - Times of India | References - Zipdocs.Tips

[Top Image - Microsoft.com]

10 Things in Tech You Need to Know from This Week

The tech sector had a buzzing week. If you had a busy schedule and missed out on your readings, here's IndianWeb2 giving you a quick recap of the top 10 things that happened in the tech sector this week.

1) Facebook Introduced ‘Wedge 100’, A New Open Source Technology To Make 100GB Internet Access A Reality

In order to further increase the popularity of Facebook and enhance the experience of its existing users, Facebook through its Wedge 100 project aims to make 100-Gigabyte data connection a reality via a new state of open source technology.

2) Banks open-source the Blockchain Platform developed by them

A group that includes more than 70 of the world's biggest financial institutions has developed a new blockchain platform named Corda. The code, which has the potential of becoming the industry standard for the nascent technology, is now available publicly. New-York based financial technology company, R3 CEV, brought the consortium together and made Corda possible.

3) Self-driving cars won't work in India

nuTonomy, a MIT startup which had recently decided to put self-driving cabs on the roads of Singapore, has predicted the concept might not work in India. The traffic situation in India is quite dense which makes it unfavourable for self-driving technology to deal with since the brains behind autonomous vehicles are computers, which function on a set of rules.

4) Telangana government planning to come up with IoT, Smart Technology Policy To Encourage Startups

In order to encourage IoT based product development companies and other innovations in Telangana, the state government has come up with a unique IoT and Smart Technology Policy.

5) Visa Open Sources Its Blockchain Platform

San Francisco-based Chain has released an open source version of its Chain Core software. The source code of Chain’s proprietary blockchain can be accessed on the startup’s webpage on the famous code-sharing website, Github. With its this initiative, the startup aims to transform the blockchain narrative from the PowerPoint presentation to the prototype. Prior to this, anyone wanting to use the Chain Core software had to join hands with one of Chain's collaborators, which includes names such as Nasdaq, Visa, Fidelity, Citigroup, and Capital One.

6) Indian Smartphone maker Karbonn is making use of Artificial Intelligence to boost e-commerce

While world’s top smartphone manufacturers are working on bringing Artificial Intelligence into smartphones, Indian Smartphone maker Karbonn has decided to use the technology to aid commerce. The company's new Fashion Eye smartphone allows users to click the photo of whatever garment they like after which the AI engine gets to work and gives the users information about where they can buy that particular garment or a similar one across online sellers.

7) New Open Source Tech May Soon Bring Free Calls For Everyone In The World

Free audio calls to everyone in the world might become a reality in the near future. All thanks to a man named Mikeal, who has been doing Open Source for over a decade now. The project, Roll Call, aims to give everyone in the world a power to make Free Calls for Everyone in the world.

As of now, the project offers the following features:

a) It offers reliable audio-only calls between multiple participants.

b) Users can drag audio files into the call window and play into the call.

c) It offers built-in call recording, with podcast quality recording of every participants local audio sent continuously to the recorder.

d) It has almost no reliance on infrastructure, the app is hosted in gh-pages on GitHub.

8) Internet of Things Takes Down the World Wide Web

The largest International platform, Internet, recently came under a attack caused by a large distributed denial of service (DDoS). The attack was facilitated by hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected devices—from Web cameras to routers—that had been hacked to contribute to the attack. This detail made many industry experts term the attack as the onset of the doom of the Internet.

9) IBM Acquires Sanovi Technologies to Expand Disaster Recovery Services for Hybrid Cloud

IBM has signed an agreement to acquire Sanovi Technologies, a privately held company that is known to provide services such as cloud migration, hybrid cloud recovery, business continuity software for enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructure.

According to industry experts, all these capabilities of Sanovi along with advanced analytics will enable IBM to bolster its Software Defined Resiliency strategy and delivery of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services for clients currently in the midst of a digital and hybrid cloud transformation.

10) ICANN Introduces .Google, .Apple,.ibm, and Other Branded Internet Addresses

Recent changes in the two-year old internet rule which had limited the use of top-level domains has now brought .xyz, .movie and .paris into existence in email addresses and websites.

The new rule is capable of giving brand names a whole new importance in their internet addresses. In fact, tech giant Google has already paved the way for companies to flaunt their brand names in the digital realm. The company recently published a new website, blog.google, that makes use of the .google domain name, rather than the commonly used .com.

ICANN Introduces .Google, .Apple,.ibm, and Other Branded Internet Addresses

Tech giant Google is making way for companies to flaunt the name of their brands in the digital realm.

The company recently published a new website, blog.google, that makes use of the .google domain name, rather than the commonly used .com. The new website has consolidated nineteen previously individual Google blogs.

The search giant's website is at the forefront of a much expected boom in the websites category as it has taken advantage of a recent change in the internet rules that had limited the use of these suffixes, called the top-level domains. This is has now brought .xyz, .movie and .paris into existence in email addresses and websites.

The new internet rules can also end up giving brand names a whole new importance in their internet addresses. In fact, many top companies have already requested and received approval for using domain names. This includes .samsung, .ibm, .apple, .kindle and .canon.

This isn't just limited to tech companies. The list of approved domain names also includes . mcdonald, .hbo, .ford, .delta, .statefarm, .nike, .oldnavy and .homedepot.

It is important to know that approval is just the first step. While one can't really predict right now how enthusiastic a majority of the companies will be about the new domain names. But, so far, search giant Google is emerging as one of the most enthusiastic beaver.

According to a statement given out by Google's spokeswoman Andrea Faville, while Google is extensively exploring other ways in which they can use .google, the search giant believes blog.google is a fun way to use their own branded domain. Google has now brought the blogs together on a new central website called the Keyword.

What could become a little difficult task for the search giant is the financial commitment to others. With the application fee of a whopping $185,000 and an annual operation fee of $30,000, owning their own domain names might remain only a dream for all the mom-and-pop shops.

But still, there are quite a number of companies other than Google that are considering the new domain names as a good investment.

Currently, if you input canon.com in your web browser, you'll be automatically redirected to global.canon. Similarly, famous French bank BNP Paribas uses group.paribas. Branded domains can help in adding distinction to an internet address, too.

Renting out generic top-level domain (GTLD) names also has the potential of becoming a very financially viable business. In a January auction this year, GMO Registry bid a extravagant $41.5 million to win rights to sell .shop domain names. And then in July this year, Nu Dot Co ended up wining the .web domain with a bid of $135 million.

All this bidding money ends up in ICANN, a nonprofit organization that overlooks all the internet plumbing on behalf of governments, universities and companies, as well as the public.

It is interesting to note that a number of brand holders were initially opposed to this expansion of the domain names, but they still ended up signing up for them. Out of the original 1,930 applications filed for generic top-level domains, 246 have been branded.

[Top Image- techgyd.com]

Dot Bharat domain name to be launched on Aug.21

Last month we published news that Indian govt. is about to release Hindi domain names on or around India's Independence day this year. Finally the launch Hindi domain names has got official words and in order to facilitate multi-lingual Internet access all around the country, Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is the Minister of Communications and IT Minister, is all set to launch the dot Bharat domain in New Delhi on 21st August, 2014.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), which is an autonomous body, will reportedly enable the dot Bharat ccTLD.

Interestingly, the dot Bharat domain can be registered in Devnagari scripts such as Maithili, Nepali, Bodo, Marathi and Konkani.

The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has already cosigned the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) to National Internet Exchange of India in seven Indian languages.

NIXI and C-DAC are working very hard together and have also jointly formed a committee on International Domain Names (IDNs) in order to introduce domains in local languages such as Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, and Gujrati.
The International Domain Names which will be introduced in Indian Languages are most likely to be represented in local language characters. These domain names can also carry characters or letters from Non-American Standard Code for Information Interchange scripts.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII is a character encoding scheme which is based on the ordering of the English Alphabet.

The INRegistry has been made compulsory in the country for the process of registration, operation and management of International Domain Name in Indian languages.

In December 2013, the number of Internet subscribers in the country stood at 238.71 million, out of which Himachal Pradesh had the lowest number of Internet users with just 2.04 million subscribers. These facts and figures were recently given out by the Minister of Communication and IT Minister while informing the Lok Sabha.

The Government hopes that the domain names in the Indian languages will increase Internet penetration in the most remote areas of the country where the literacy rate is low. It further hopes that this would also accelerate local content delivery and other related services in these rural and remote areas of the country.

Govt. to launch Hindi Domain names on Independence day

In order to boost Internet access and governance in remote and rural areas of the country, the Department of Information Technology and Electronics has come up with Hindi language domain names. The domains will be launched on 15th August, on the eve of the country’s 67th Independence Day.

.Bharat written in Devanagari script will be launched on 15^th August 2014 and as a result of it the PMO website (pmindia.nic.in) can then be accessed using the Devanagari characters (Pradhanmantri.Bharat - www.प्रधानमंत्री.भारत).

The government has reserved Sarkar.Bharat and Shiksha.Bharat for itself and the educational institutions respectively. The government has also directed the Union Territories and states to register their respective names under the .Bharat domain name.

The policy framework which was required for the implementation of .Bharat country code top level domain has been completed beforehand in collaboration with various governmental agencies like the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and the National Internet Exchange of India.

Internet has now become a global resource and is instrumental in the socio-economic development of a country. Our very own Prime Minister had long ago realized the power of it and is an avid user of social media and Internet himself. Native languages also play a crucial role in a country like ours and government’s this initiative is surely going to help the half a billion Hindi speaking people in the country.

This initiative by the government is all set to benefit people who could not access the Internet using the English characters and have Hindi as their first language. The government has plans of launching this service in Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Gujrati and Punjabi in the near future.

The .IN Registery, which is a nodal agency of the National Internet Exchange of India, is even encouraging the various government departments, business organisations and public sector undertakings to adopt the .Bharat domain in order to increase their Internet engagement.

This initiative will help in bringing the people living in rural and remote areas of the country nearer to the centre and will help in bridging the digital divide that is prevalent right now.

Govt. to launch Hindi Domain names on Independence day

In order to boost Internet access and governance in remote and rural areas of the country, the Department of Information Technology and Electronics has come up with Hindi language domain names. The domains will be launched on 15th August, on the eve of the country’s 67th Independence Day.

.Bharat written in Devanagari script will be launched on 15^th August 2014 and as a result of it the PMO website (pmindia.nic.in) can then be accessed using the Devanagari characters (Pradhanmantri.Bharat - www.प्रधानमंत्री.भारत).

The government has reserved Sarkar.Bharat and Shiksha.Bharat for itself and the educational institutions respectively. The government has also directed the Union Territories and states to register their respective names under the .Bharat domain name.

The policy framework which was required for the implementation of .Bharat country code top level domain has been completed beforehand in collaboration with various governmental agencies like the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and the National Internet Exchange of India.

Internet has now become a global resource and is instrumental in the socio-economic development of a country. Our very own Prime Minister had long ago realized the power of it and is an avid user of social media and Internet himself. Native languages also play a crucial role in a country like ours and government’s this initiative is surely going to help the half a billion Hindi speaking people in the country.

This initiative by the government is all set to benefit people who could not access the Internet using the English characters and have Hindi as their first language. The government has plans of launching this service in Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Gujrati and Punjabi in the near future.

The .IN Registery, which is a nodal agency of the National Internet Exchange of India, is even encouraging the various government departments, business organisations and public sector undertakings to adopt the .Bharat domain in order to increase their Internet engagement.

This initiative will help in bringing the people living in rural and remote areas of the country nearer to the centre and will help in bridging the digital divide that is prevalent right now.