To create a truly inclusive digital economy, Internet has to treat all domain names equally across scripts / languages. Addressing the opportunities of Universal Acceptance and the scope for adopting UA for Indic Languages, The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) supported by ICANN organized a seminar here today. Universal acceptance is the concept that all domain names and email addresses are accepted, validated, stored, processed and displayed in a consistent and effective manner.

UASG and ICANN have been actively working on realizing the importance of increasing linguistic presence on the web and encouraging developers to support all domain names and email addresses in multiple languages across the world.

Speaking at the seminar Dr Ajay Data, Founder & CEO of Data XGen Technologies emphasized, “If organizations are looking for a large untapped market then Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) and email address internationalization (EAI) are very essential and low hanging opportunity to address the population which has never experienced websites and email. Now it is possible to have online shopping portals / websites in local Indian languages to serve non-English speaking population”, he said.

Dr Ajay Data, Founder & CEO, Data Xgen Technologies further added, “Usage of IDN and UA developments allows for offering websites and URLs in Indic scripts to Indians. This opens up a $10 Billion opportunity for digital businesses as it allows them to reach out to a whole new set of audience which has remained untapped due to the digital barrier”.

An IDN is a domain name, which uses a particular encoding and format to allow a wider range of scripts to represent domain names such as Gujarati, Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari and many more scripts. In simple words a domain name with non-English characters is called an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN).

Humans have a variety of languages and alphabets that are familiar to them and domain names do too. IDN unlocks an increased familiarity and affinity for humans. Well it is easy to say now that IDNs are an investment in your company’s future. Also, such audience uses keyboards that enables only their native language, thus when they look for a domain name, it makes complete sense for companies to make these domains available for them.