Government to push for Indian language IDNs at ICANN Meeting

IDNs are one of the critical factors for democratisation and universalisation of the Internet. It has already introduced 13 language test names, including in the Devanagari and Tamil scripts. Its meeting is being held in New Delhi.

WITH INTERNET growing at a rocketing speed in India and the country at the forefront of technology change, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body charged with overseeing Internet address system is holding its international public meeting in New Delhi.

The meeting, beginning on February 11, will conclude on February 15, with top people from government and private sector participating in it.

An important issue, which is likely to be discussed prominently in this meeting, is a workshop on Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) in Indian languages and scripts.

IDNs are one of the critical factors for democratisation and universalisation of the Internet. ICANN has already introduced 13 language test names, including in the Devanagari and Tamil scripts.

India is however pushing for more language names at the top level, so that Internet becomes accessible and available to those sections of population, which do not know English.

New Delhi, all along, has been pushing for multi-lingual Internet, which will make the cyber world accessible and also increase the amount of net content to the users in their own language.

It will also discuss mid-term review of ICANN’s Joint Project Agreement with the United States government and the continued transition of its role in the private sector.

ICANN is a multi-stakeholder body and GAC (Government Advisory Committee) is one of the components of ICANN. GAC advises ICANN on various Public Policy issues relating to Internet. The government of India is a member of the GAC. Furthermore, the secretariat of the GAC is presently housed in the department of Information Technology, government of India for a five-year period from 2006 to 2010.

It may be recalled that ICANN was created through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the US department of commerce and ICANN, a public private partnership, for transition management of the Domain Names System (DNS) from the US government to the global community.

The last JPA (Joint Partnership Agreement) was signed between the US department of commerce and ICANN in October, 2006, a pact for three years extending the US department of commerce oversight of the body, while leaving the possibility open of the group becoming independent as early as April this year.

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