India is moving towards developing multi lingual domains, where states will work on all 22 constitutional languages : Dr Govind, CEO,NIXI

The 2nd edition of World Domain Day kicked off at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi on Friday where Dr Govind, CEO, National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) discussed about the development of domain industry in India. “India is moving towards developing multi lingual domains, where states will work on all 22 constitutional languages”, he said while adding that in the coming time, even the URL and the content will be in the regional and local languages. He informed that so far more than 1.7 million domains have been registered under .IN but the challenge for the players remained “the high application fee of $1,80,000 for domain registration.”

With the Modi Government visualizing a Digital India, a huge rise is expected in the penetration of internet across the country with many government and private players applying for domain, for eg .BHARAT, .SBI, .RELIANCE, .TATA, .BIRLA etc. Moreover, domains are being picked up  across different categories like .NGO (for NGOs), .DELHI (Geo Domain) etc. In view of this opportunity, already 6000 hindi domain applications have been received and they are only growing with time. It is evident that after USA and UK, domain industry has now moved to Asia, Africa and countries like Brazil where the focus is on multi lingual domains.

The informative and triggering first session featuring Dr. Govind (CEO, NIXI), Mr. Samiran (Head of India for ICANN) and Mr. Annurag Batra (Chairman of Buness World and Exchange4media), was followed with discussions by  eminent speakers like  Mr. Prakhar (CEO of Axiom.com),  Dr. Ajay Kumar (Joint Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology), Mr Pawan Duggal ( President of Cyberlaws.net) and Sanjeev Goyal (Founder President, Mitsu).

Mr. Prakhar discussed about the need of domains and how and why people should invest in the domain industry in India.  He also threw light on the costs involved asserting that “any premium domain name is in the average range of $5000-10000.” Also that, “3 letter domain names are the most expensive ones across world”.  He, further, discussed about the different categories of domain names such as Geo domains, product names, acronyms, destination names etc.

Educating the audience about the legal issues in domain industry was an prominent topic of discussion at the event with Mr Pawan Duggal, one of the top 4 Cyber Lawyers’ in the world and President of Cyberlaws.net, taking the lead and giving illustrations from the domain industry highlighting the cyber cases of Maruti.com , MTV.com etc.”Every person has to be very careful in selecting the domain name so as to avoid legal issues”, he added. He also emphasized on the point that all intermediaries should be very carefully in examining the domain names and then registering accordingly. Domain names are always registered on first come first basis and hence, there should neither be any conflict of interest nor a bad faith in registration. He informed that “more than 2/3rd of the complaints goes in the favour of complainants by only filing the online petition.”

The World Domain Day concluded on a lighter note with a panel discussion and Q&A session and was a huge success in creating awareness among young entrepreneurs, start-ups, webpreneurs, students and tech savvy audience.