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Internationalized Domain Names

IDNs are perhaps the only hope to increase Internet penetration in India, enabling the non-English speaking population to comfortably use the Internet. By Varun Aggarwal

The Internet has become an important part of our lives. Whenever we are looking for any kind of information, be it the latest movies running at the local PVR or the latest bestseller, we just ‘Google’ it. It’s become such an important part of our lives that many of us undergo depression if the Internet is down for even a day. But, when I use this term ‘we’, am I really referring to ‘we’—the Indians or just ‘we’—the English literate Indians! That’s the question that arises when we talk about the importance and growth of the Internet in the country. Though India has one of the largest English speaking populations in the world, the number is still small in percentage terms while comparing it to our entire population.

To solve this problem, people started bringing up Web content in regional languages, trying to make the Internet reachable to more and more Indians. The catch however is that while the content is the regional languages, the user still needs to type and remember English based Web addresses which may not be too comfortable a prospect. A possible answer to this problem could be the concept of internationalized domain names or IDNs.

IDNs, a brief background

Today, due to the technical limitations of the Internet, domain names can only be registered in ASCII, otherwise known as plain text (eg: www.expresscomputeronline.com). International characters such as in the domain name GoònjCò.in cannot be interpreted by the domain name system (DNS) and therefore cannot reside in a domain name registry as a registered name.

With the development of ‘Punycode’, an international standard adopted in 2003, one can convert non-ASCII characters into a DNS-friendly format. It provides a mechanism for words with non-ASCII characters to be represented at a domain registry and the DNS in ASCII format, but be seen and used by the general public in their expected native form. ‘Punycode’ is used to translate the word containing non-ASCII characters into an ASCII string that can be registered by a domain name registry and resolved through the DNS. To convert IDNs to ASCII, the international characters must first be mapped to ASCII using a table that is developed by an internationally approved language authority.

In the example of GoònjCò.in, the characters that represent the second level domain (the word before ‘.in’) is converted to the ASCII string “p1b6ci4b4b3a” using a Punycode converter. Then a prefix (“xn—“) is added to the name to clearly identify this as an IDN in the DNS. So the resulting ASCII name for the IDN GoònjCò.in is xn— p1b6ci4b4b3a.in.

Ram Mohan, chief technology officer and vice-president, business operations, Afilias explained, “This conversion process is completed by registrars, or domain name retailers, who use the Nameprep and Stringprep specifications from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) to prepare names in the Punycode, or “:xn—“ format. Non-ASCII names must be converted to Punycode before being submitted the registry, since the registry can only maintain ASCII characters, and is responsible for ensuring that each name is unique. Further, the registry prepares and publishes the ‘zone file’ for each domain it is responsible for, and the zone file is the directory authority that ultimately enables each name to be located on the Internet. The registry actually reserves the name in its ‘punycode’ format (not the native format), and IDN compliant applications make the appropriate translations to and from the user, as part of the resolution process.”

Barriers in the growth of IDNs

While the potential for IDNs is great, the complications that lie ahead pose quite a challenge for NIXI and other parties involved in the development process. India has 24 languages and 12 scripts (probably more than any other country), which obviously means that different languages can share similar characters and scripts.

Bhavin Turakhia, Chairman and CEO, Directi said, “This basic and most fundamental issue leads to several others in the overall adoption of IDNs including not just technical, but also policy formation issues. Having said that, India’s initiative towards IDN implementations and the amount of work that has gone into it so far, just goes to show the opportunity that India can see over here. Even though India’s population currently stands at a little over a billion people, only about 125 million people speak in English. Hindi is the most widely used language with its user base at 300 million people, and Urdu has about 130 million people which more than doubles if you account for all our neighboring countries as well. So if IDNs can be effectively adopted, the overall Internet user base in India can potentially double or triple. However, there is yet a lot of work to be done on this front.”

Though this problem seems to be common for every country, it’s more acute in India. Comparing the situation with China, India has its work cut out. There are over 1.6 billion Chinese speakers, using only two scripts that also share characters with the Japanese and Korean languages.

Turakhia explained, “The development efforts taken in these countries have shown corresponding results much faster since the complexity levels are not as large as ours. It also means that the amount of online content in these languages is significantly larger. To add to this, the existing Internet penetration in these countries is far greater, even though IDN implementation is a step towards increasing it in India. Our current penetration level stands at stands at just 5.3%, as compared to 15.9% in China, and 68.7% in Japan.”

Browsers already support IDNs—both Internet Explorer 7.0 and Firefox 1.5 onwards. There is not a recognition/understanding problem there. There are already many Web sites in India that provide content in Hindi, Tamil and other languages. Moreover, many e-mails are sent containing non-ASCII characters.

The main challenge is that the domain names themselves have not yet made the transition from ASCII, forcing users to switch back and forth between languages when they move between the content and the address. “Now that the technology is available to enable the transition, we are working through the policy issues. When both are complete, users will have an intelligible, cohesive and simple way to conduct their communications entirely (or nearly entirely) in their native language,” opined Mohan.

The way ahead

To draw a parallel with just the mobile industry, its users currently outnumber Internet users by a factor of three. In order to induce a change in this statistic, there are issues that still need to be addressed; one being the availability and affordability of the Internet. Since telecommunication infrastructure directly influences the Internet accessibility costs, it’s essential that the Government facilitates its growth throughout the country. At the same time, the efforts targeted at IDNs are promising and one step in the right direction.

IDNs are a critical factor for democratization of the Internet. We are being optimistic about its realization in the beginning of this year. Turakhia said, “For trademark owners, Sunrise registrations are expected to open in the first quarter of ‘08. Already, 13 language test names have been introduced by ICANN, which include Devanagari and Tamil scripts. As far as mass adoption is concerned, it would take a while, since a major part of the country is not yet exposed to the usage of Internet itself, and those that are, barely understand how it can be used in another language.”

Mohan said, “We think that Internet growth is directly linked to use. Telecom is growing rapidly because the common man sees an everyday use to it. I believe that projects such as the NeGP (National e-Governance Plan) as well as state-based efforts to make all Government services directly available on the Internet will benefit the common man. Internet penetration is also low because most people are thinking of the Internet as something accessed by a PC or a laptop.” This is about to change, and in a dramatic way. The next wave is going to be the Internet on the mobile device—and this will leverage the hypergrowth in mobile phone sales and usage in India.

India will leapfrog ‘Internet 1.0’ which was based on PCs and laptops, and is poised to be the first nation in the world that goes to ‘Internet 2.0’ based primarily on access from a mobile phone.

Since most Indians prefer their own language, the introduction of IDN’s will certainly be a positive move, and it will work in conjunction with other factors to accelerate adoption. Hopefully, with the advent of IDNs in the country, we will not have to associate the Internet with solely the English speaking people of the country.

varun.aggarwal@expressindia.com