India has registered a total of 1.037 million .com and .net domain names, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) by VeriSign.

The first quarter of 2010 saw over 193 million domain name registrations across all the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) — an increase of 11 million domain name registrations as compared to the first quarter of 2009. New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of 2.7 million per month in the first quarter of 2010 for a total of 8.1 million new registrations in the quarter, reveal the findings of the first quarter of 2010 DNIB.

The report also spotlights a new study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), that gauges the commercial impact of the internet, in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the first .com domain name registration.

It estimates that the annual global economic benefits of the commercial Internet equals $1.5 trillion — a figure that eclipses the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy, and government investment in R&D, combined.

ITIF also estimates that, assuming ecommerce continues to grow just half as fast as it grew between 2005 and 2010, then by 2020, it will add $3.8 trillion to the global economy.

Although online commerce is becoming commonplace worldwide, it’s still more popular in some countries than others.

In assessing 30 nations, ITIF found Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States lead the rest of the world in shopping, selling, and doing business online.

Source : http://www.verisign.com/in/press/2010/dnib-release.html
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/over-1-mn-com-net-domain-names-in-india/397640/

As I write this I’m returning from this year’s FutureNet conference in Boston where much of the discussion centered around the twin challenges of dealing with depletion of the IPv4 address space and the growing concern that IPv6 adoption will exacerbate scalability issues within Internet routers. While there was much disagreement about the best way to address these issues, the majority of speakers agreed that despite longer-term route scalability concerns, a migration to IPv6, whether we like or not, is in our immediate future.

Why? Quite simply because the immediate concern among Internet architects is that we’re running out of addresses. Depending on whose estimate you believe, we’ve got another one to two years before Internet service providers have no more addresses to assign, meaning that if you want a new block to support a new facility, or your provider wants to expand its mobile offerings, you, and they, will find that they lack the IPv4 addresses to meet demand.

There are a few options for short-term fixes. One is to create a market for excess IPv4 address space to enable those who have extra space and who today have no incentive to give to sell it to whoever needs it. Another is to increase the use of network address translation to hide private networks behind small numbers of shared public addresses. Both of these create additional concerns: who would manage the market to ensure that large entities don’t gobble up all available address space? And, there is the potential for carrier-grade NAT to disrupt the Internet architecture that’s based on smart end-points and a dumb core.

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For the first time in history of the internet, addresses without Latin characters have been launched. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are among the first countries to get the upcoming “country codes” in Arabic script. It will also be given for Chinese, Thai and Tamil users to use the internet in their own language.

Rod Beckstrom, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), President termed this a historic move and mentioned that a lot of behind the scenes work is responsible for this measure.

About 20 countries have already sought approval for international domains from Icann. China was the first country to develop systems that made it possible to enter a web address in Chinese. It noted that there is still some time before non-Latin scripts can be properly integrated into Internet infrastructure and cannot work on all the computers.

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WAM Abu Dhabi, 26th May 2010 (WAM) — The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) will launch by the end of May a new Arabic content domain (.emarat), becoming the first Arab country to obtain the approval of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN). (.emarat) (.������) will be the official Arabic top level domain for the United Arab Emirates.

Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanem, Director General of the TRA, told the media today at the Emirates Palace ICANN has chosen the UAE to become the first Arab country to launch its Arabic domain name for the availability of the technical requirements and its ultra-modern telecommunications infrastructure. Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO was present at the press conference.

The move is part of TRA’s strategy to support and enhance Arabic content on the Internet and has been made under the new directions of ICANN, the international corporation responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, which allows the use of languages other than English as an equivalent to the domain names for countries. emarat” is the Arabic equivalent for the currently used domain name “.ae”.

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Internet should have more local content in regional languages: ITU

There is a need for more local content in regional languages on the Internet, a report by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) 2010 has said.

The report said that the web, which is still dominated by English language, need to change as the proportion of English-speaking Internet users is declining.

The report, jointly prepared by the ITU, Unesco and the WHO, was released today at the World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC) 2010, being held here.

English is spoken by just 15 per cent of the world population and non-English speakers are increasingly growing online. Another indication for the diversification of content on the Internet is the growing number of websites that are registered under country domain names.

Some of the highest 2005-09 growth rates in terms of newly registered domain names were found in India (.in), Russia (.ru) and China (.cn),” the report said.

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