The Internet, as we know it, is now in for a radical change, in two ways.
The governance of Internet has just come out of the US hands, embracing a multi-stakeholder leadership to drive the growth of the web. The second change will take the Internet to the non-English speaking literates in India and other countries.
People can create web sites with URLs and email ids in Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. This is going to be a game changer to take the Internet to the masses, which is largely English-illiterate.
The challenge, however, is to develop universally accepted protocols to let the email providers recognise and process the non-English mail ids. People in Russia, China and a few other countries already have such services.
A massive work is under way, with ICANN is working to standardadise the local scripts to remove the scope for confusion.
A lot of technical and linguistic work is being done by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, GoI), Rahul Gosain, Director, Union Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, has said.
Based in the US, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) prescribes the rules and develops the framework for the growth of Internet.
“Once we are ready with the basic framework, we will put it for public feedback for six months. After incorporating the changes, we will launch services at least in a few languages to start with,” Low Jia Rong, Vice-President and Managing Director of ICANN (Asia-Pacific), told BusinessLine .
Change of guard at ICANN Meanwhile, ICANN has just undergone a radical change in stewardship. The US, which has been leading the Internet governance at ICANN, has relinquished its leadership. Beginning on September 30, a group of stakeholders representing a large number of governments have taken over the leadership.
“The transition has been smooth. We have different regional headquarters to oversee the Internet governance issues for different regions. The Asia-Pacific chapter is head-quartered in Singapore, the Europe, the Gulf and Africa are being looked after from Istanbul (Turkey),” Low Jia Rong said.
Low Jia Rong, along with other top leaders of ICANN, is in Hyderabad ahead of the Internet body’s 57th global meet scheduled to be held here from November 3 to 9. The conference, which will be attended by representatives from over 80 countries, will discuss a host of issues that drive the Internet growth.
How ICANN gets funds When you take a domain name (or web address), you pay certain fee to the domain givers. A part of the fee would go to the ICANN. “We get 18 cents per domain per year,” he said.
With over 300 million domain names dotting the web, the ICANN gets a sizeable revenue. “Besides, we get voluntary contributions from some countries,” he said.