Are you .IN?

India has finally taken to liberal and market friendly policies to register a
large number of domain names under its own country code -.IN. This, hoping for
a large scale adoption by residents, individuals, government entities, public
service organizations and businesses to help establish their Indian identity in
the Internet space. .IN, then, can hopefully be a symbol of India's impressive
growth in the area of IT.

The government followed a reasonably proactive policy, with the Ministry of
Communications and Information Technology approving the transfer of .IN registry
management and operations to NIXI (National Internet Exchange of India). NIXI
has now signed an agreement with a global provider of domain name registry
services. Afilias India will assist NIXI in the creation of the .IN registry to
implement domain registration policies by broadening the domain's distribution
channel, implementing new state-of-the-art registry technology and enabling near
real-time registration of new names.

Registrar companies have also been appointed to work at the retail level of
the domain name industry and offer Internet users and businesses the opportunity
to purchase these names and also additional value-added services like e-mail and
web hosting, among others.

In addition to the .IN domain name, registrars like Net4India have plans to
sell .IN extensions such as .CO.IN, .FIRM.IN, and .IND.IN. Says Jasjit Sawhney,
CEO, Net4India, "Unlike other domain names such as .COM, .IN represents
India and gives a unique opportunity to Indian companies. The concept is bound
to be popular with not just IT companies, but all Indian organizations."

A 'Sunrise Period' of 21 days was announced from January 1st 2005,
wherein all Indian trademark and sign mark owners have been given preference to
apply for the same .IN domain names. From February 16th 2005, the public will be
allowed to apply for any available name. "They cannot, however, violate
anybody else's trademark rights. In the event where a person registers a name
which someone else has the rights to, there would be a need to resort to the
dispute resolution mechanism," Sawhney says.

The technology provided by Afilias India is enabling domain retailers to
build automated systems. The company is also providing some policy advice to the
.IN Registry, which runs the operations for the world's 5th and 6th largest
Registries (.INFO and .ORG). Its DNS system is among the fastest in the world,
enabling new registrations to have a registration-to-resolution time of under
two minutes. "It used to take over twelve hours before January 1!",
says Ram Mohan, VP Business Operations and CTO, Afilias.

"We're bringing IDNs (Interna—tionalised Domain Names) into the .IN
domain for the first time and also partnering with the Indian government to make
domain names work in vernacular languages. Also planned is a high-security
Internet innovation called DNSSEC (DNS Security Extension) inside the .IN
registry," he adds.

Seems like the time has come to assert the .IN culture that we hail from!

Team DQ