BANGALORE, INDIA: The Internet has clearly revolutionized the way the world communicates and searches for information and services.

This change is evident in various aspects of our daily lives – from booking travel tickets, to running searches, to chatting online, to sending e-mail, to trading stocks, to banking online. The list of activities is endless! 

The total number of Internet users worldwide reached 1.9 billion earlier this year, with India alone boasting of 81 million users, according to a study published on http://www.internetworldstats.com/.

While the dominant language used on the Internet is English, nearly 60 percent of Internet users are non-English speaking, says the Everture International Report.

The geographic expansion of the Internet and the corresponding increase of use by various nations, groups and communities that speak different languages eventually resulted in the need for domain names that consisted of characters from other languages apart from English.

While Web content written in various languages has been around for a long time, domain name addresses in local scripts have finally arrived. These domain names in local/regional languages are called Internationalized Domain Names or IDNs.

IDNs are one of the most significant developments to the Internet since its inception. The domain name is a critical way to locate resources on the Internet, and IDNs make the Internet more accessible for non-English speaking countries and local communities by allowing users to access the Internet in their local language.

IDNs demystified
Historically, domain names have contained ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters i.e. domain names have used the English alphabet (a,b,c…z), numbers (0, 1…9) and the hyphen (-). Second level IDNs such as IDN.TLD (Top Level Domain) have also been available for a number of years.

In October 2009, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced the launch of IDN country code top level domains (ccTLDs) that will be written entirely in the local language. By July 2010,[update] thirteen countries announced IDN ccTLD offerings.

India’s Department of Information Technology (DIT) and Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC) are leading the way in this important advancement in scripts computing standards.

DIT submitted its application to ICANN in May 2010 for its approval of the launch of the new TLD, .bharat in seven Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati - making it possible for many Indians to navigate the Internet using their local/native language.

DIT’s application has reportedly received the initial clearance for IDNs in all the seven regional languages, but final approval will still be needed, according to a report. Also, C-DAC is reportedly ready with the technology to affect the change and expects to roll out the IDN ccTLDs in 2011.