More than three years ago ICANN, the global body that oversees the operation of the domain name or website address system, cleared the ground for the introduction of a broader web address regime covering local languages.
The World Wide Web will soon allow addresses with domain names such as .Bharat or its equivalent in Indian languages. Sanskrit and Malayalam addresses can have the domain name of ‘.Bharatam’. Tamil websites can use ‘.India’ and Urdu, ‘.Hindostan’.
The naming regime is likely to be rolled out in a few months time. But getting players involved in domain registration implement the measure is a challenge. Popularising the use of local languages for website addresses may be another hitch.
It was more than three years ago that the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the global body that oversees the operation of the domain name or website address system, cleared the ground for the introduction of a broader web address regime covering local languages.
In India, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, in consultation with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), had proposed a policy by which the Devanagari script-based languages (Marathi, Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit and Nepali) and Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Assamese and Bangla would be made part of the new regime in phases.
Eventually, all official languages, including those using Perso-Arabic scripts such as Urdu, Sindhi and Kashmiri, were to be covered.
ICANN had technically cleared the possible use of the .Bharat top level domain name for Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali and Tamil a couple of years ago.
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