More domains in local languages allow for decentralisation: Jia Rong Low, Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement and Managing Director- Asia Pacific, ICANN

Nov 10, 2022

NEW DELHI. 10 November 2022: The Internet requires three fundamental areas - domain names, IP addresses and protocols to be maintained well, and it is only possible with global participation, said Mr Jia Rong Low, Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement and Managing Director - Asia Pacific, ICANN at an Interactive session on Multilingual Internet and Universal Acceptance for Developers organised by official local India UA Chapter under the ages of India's apex industry chamber FICCI. 

Mr Low spoke on India's target to bring 1.2 billion people online and underscored language being a key hurdle in getting people to use the Internet. "It is part of our responsibility to provide the infrastructure, so those who cannot come online can," he said. He noted that the past ten years were about big tech. However, "decentralisation is the buzzword now," he said. "More domains in local languages allow for the decentralisation."  

However, he underlined that infrastructure only provides a baseline and encourages people to use it, "programmes and applications have to accept the domain names in local scripts." Mr Jia Rong Low also said that ICANN would announce a Global UA Day next year, and a global event will be organised in India. 

On the occasion, Dr Ajay Data, Chair, UASG, ICANN and CEO, Data Ingenious Global Limited, highlighted the importance of UA and EAI as a foundation of the multilingual internet of India. He further mentioned that there are nearly 1200 top-level domains that exist today, however, software needs to accept and accommodate these. He averred that Universal Acceptance of internet domains is a USD 9.8 billion opportunity.

In this regard, Mr Anil Kumar Jain, Chief Executive Officer, NIXI, also noted that Universal Acceptance is an ample business opportunity as the next billion users will come from local languages. He emphasised that language should also be part of this digital India, as 82 per cent of Indians does not communicate in English. "If we have to bring every citizen of this world on the internet, multilingual internet is the answer." He noted that the government of India's Multilingual Internet Group is working to advise the government to frame the policies on the acceptance of multilingual Internet.