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Network Solutions to register domain names in 9 Indian languages

Priya Ganapati in Bombay

Network Solutions Registrar, the domain registration company, announced that it would start registering domain names in nine Indian languages. These include Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Tamil, and Telugu.

A VeriSign company, Network Solutions is the leading company to register domain names across the world.

"The goal is to make the Internet accessible to everybody. Some of the languages are used by a small percentage of users. But that is really our goal, to help everyone use the Internet," Arthur Chang, managing director, Asia Pacific, VeriSign, said.

Chang hoped that by this expansion of multilingual services, more small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) and individuals can enjoy the global marketplace by conducting business online in their own language. And the first step towards it would be the availability of domain names registration in local languages.

According to IDC estimates, there were 4.47 million Internet users in India at the end of 2000. That figure is expected to climb to 7.27 million in 2001 and 37.59 million by 2005.

Until recently, every domain name was registered using exclusively ASCII English characters. Domain names registration in local languages is part of Network Solutions plan to roll out multilingual offerings as part of their 'multilingual testbed' project.

In order to enable easy registration of domain names in Indian languages, VeriSign has established Indian partners to provide its customers with a countrywide network of Web identity service and support.

Network Solutions also hopes to open an office in India to facilitate easier liaisoning with its partners.

Though there has been some skepticism over the growth potential of Indian language domain names, Chang said that their experience in other Asian countries showed that local language domain names are immensely popular. "We launched local language domain name registrations in China, Korea and Japan on November 10. By the end of the year, we had 80,000 registrations," he said.

Chang conceded that in India the majority of the population on the Internet is English speaking and even local-language content on the Internet has to take off in a big way. So, will local language domain name registrations really work from India?

"I think it is a chicken and egg problem. For instance, in Calcutta, nearly 70 per cent of people still read a newspaper in the local language. I am sure that some of those would be interested in reading the local language content on the Net. And the first step towards that is to offer domain name registrations in their language," Chang said.

Network Solutions has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National Association of Software and Service Sector companies (Nasscom) to promote greater Internet usage throughout the country.

However, Chang declined to detail the initiatives that Network Solutions and Nasscom would jointly undertake. "We have a lot of plans that need to be sketched out in greater detail. We will announce them when that is done," he said.

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