Internet servers to display website names in nine Indian scripts by June

By June this year, global internet servers will allow users to register complete website names in nine additional Indian scripts, multiple media reports stated, citing PTI

The move was announced by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), a community set up to implement Universal Acceptance principles among software developers and website owners. The principles were created to ensure consistency and accuracy over domain names and email addresses on the internet.

The nine new Indian scripts—Devanagari, Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam—will be added to the root servers of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the report added.

The label generation rules for these scripts will be finalised in a quarter, Ajay Data, chairman of UASG, told PTI.

Currently, Devanagari, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, etc. are the non-English scripts that can be used in a website name.

Once accepted, the new system will allow website owners to use any combination of letters from these Indian scripts, said the report.

“This will also solve data security and localisation issues to a large extent. We will engage with the Indian government, large enterprises, software and application developers, internet companies to accept e-mails and make their system universally acceptable to enable the next one billion non-English speaking people come online," Data told PTI.

He added that only Bangladesh is yet to submit its response to complete recommendation for the Bangla script.

The UASG was set up in February 2015 and Data is the first Indian to hold the post of chairman.