‘.in’ is not the in thing yet

It is strange how the saffron brigade missed out on the issue of

Internet domain names during the current general elections. Going by the

high level of unpopularity for the very Indian, ‘.in’ domain, it had

all the potential to become the main poll platform, with a tinge of

patriotism.

Take the case of a tech savvy vegetable vendor based in New Delhi who

decided to start selling vegetables on the Net. Instead of setting up a

server in India and going to the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST)

to register its URL with a ‘.in’ extension, he goes to the US, buys

space on a server there and pays in dollar to hire a ‘.com’

registration. For catering to a market that is restricted to New Delhi and

adjoining areas, the vegetable vendor went all the way to the US to get a

`.com’ registration to his URL. Why are we doing it? Because it makes

better business sense, the vendor might tell you.

According to National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom)

president Dewang Mehta, the NCST is estimated to have registered only

about 1,100 URLs so far with ‘.in’ extensions. What is interesting to

note is that this represents an abysmal 5-8 per cent of the total

registrations of URLs by entities based in India.

Moreover, according to a Nasscom survey, so far, about 29,800 Indian

organisations, companies and individuals have preferred the ‘.com’

registrations to the desi ‘.in’. It is learnt that most of the

applications for ‘.in’ registrations get rejected. Approximately,

450-500 applications are received by NCST every quarter for ‘.in’

registration, points out Mr Mehta.

Why is there so much lack of patriotism among those registering for

Internet URLs. "The popularity of ‘.in’ extension vis-a-vis those

without '.in' does not have much to do with the country preference. The

'.in' extension represents country domain and refer to web sites

registered in India. This is similar to '.sg' for Singapore and '.jp' for

Japan. Therefore, more than any other reason, most companies and web users

prefer shorter and easy to remember names or addresses. In India, because

of inadequate infrastructure, people are not happy to host sites in India

and instead do the same in USA," explains Mr Mehta. It is also

important to note that USA is the only country, which does not have a

country suffix.

So the issue boils down to non-availability of adequate infrastructure

in the country, primarily bandwidth. Imagine one putting up a Web site in

India, which is to suddenly become an international craze, and due to lack

of bandwidth, not more than a few hundreds getting to log on to the site

at one point of time. The Web site will be wiped out in no time, no matter

however valuable the contents on the site are.

Almost 99 per cent of non-Indian domain names are registered in USA.

Each domain name registration for two years comes at US$70. This contract

is to be renewed after two years. It has been estimated that such

registrations and renewals have resulted in foreign exchange outgo worth

approximately US$2.3 million or Rs 90 million. The figure could be low.

But it’s a bad beginning.

Indians are not behind their international counterparts in trying to

make the most out of the huge gap in demand supply. There have a number of

cases involving disputes over domain names which 'ethically and

rightfully' belonged to party under distress, typically companies owning /

trademarked the relevant brand / company names. They have been largely

filed with Delhi High Court. Some of the URLs that have been pulled into

the courts are 'daburindia.com', 'yahooindia.com', 'drreddyslab.com', 'tanishq.com',

'jrdtata.com', 'tatagroups.com', 'microsoftindia.com', 'sapindia.com', 'sapwizard.com'

and 'nasscom.net'. The above cases have been successfully won by the

companies that have already been owning the names. Mr Mehta points out

that India is only behind USA in resolving domain names related cases.

There is no doubt that NCST has been carrying out the process of

registration in a efficient manner. However, the issue of privatising the

domain management keeps propping up occasionally. "Privatisation

always leads to competition and subsequently efficient Internet domain

management. For example, there are numerous cases where people just take

domain name, maintain them for some time and then the Web sites are found

languishing. While the name given away may not be considered a big loss;

however, going by the present addressing scheme of Internet domains, the

domain numbers are almost precious. Privatisation would lead to

competition and thus greater efficiencies in such allocations.

Importantly, many quarters including other national governments, industry

and individual groups would have greater say in the domain name

management. This is the demand the world over, feels Mr Mehta.

However, the future does not look very bleak. According to Mr Mehta,

the demand for Indian domain names (including with ‘.in’ extension) is

expected to grow at 50-60 per cent during 2000, against the annual global

demand growth of 20-25 per cent. "Once India will offer adequate

bandwidth, this demand will increase exponentially. This would be also be

a period during which we expect to see large proliferation in internet

based e-businesses as well as corporates enabling web based transactions,’’

he says.