ICANN highlights Asia Pacific role in providing the next billion Internet users

Source: ICANN.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) executives and local IT leaders convened in Bangkok this week to discuss the continued development of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) and Internet growth in the Asia Pacific region.

"The DNS is expanding and will cater for the expected continued exponential growth in Internet penetration, especially in the Asia Pacific region. Fifteen years ago, there were fewer than 500 million Internet users globally; today we have more than 3 billion, with Asia Pacific accounting for almost half of all users. Fuelled by the growth of smartphones, many developing markets in the region are now able to gain Internet access,” said Rinalia Abdul Rahim, an ICANN board member.

"The future of the Internet itself can only be described with only one word, and that word is 'more'. More people connected to the Internet. More applications. More data. More intelligence. And more opportunities for value creation by users.

"Since 2013, ICANN has rolled out more than 700 new generic top level domains (gTLDs). This is significant, as online identities and presence are important for individuals, organisations and companies. The expansion of top level domains will change the way we use the Internet and even how we interact with brands or companies. This is one of the biggest changes to the Internet since its inception.”

Source: ICANN. Internationalised domain names offer more opportunities for non-English-speaking communities to get online.

Introduced, 2012, the gTLD programme is a major evolution of the DNS. "The objective was to introduce more competition in provision of TLDs, and to encourage innovation in the use of TLDs in the Internet. Before the launch of the programme the Internet only had 22 top level domains," Rinalia said, listing well-known domains like.com, .org and .gov.

"When we launched the programme we expected about 500 applications. We were very surprised by the demand. The demand exceeded our expectation by 400%. And this was at a time when there was not much global awareness about the programme itself."

Today, there are 700 gTLDs, with the total number expected to reach 1,300.
 "What we discovered from the programme was that Internet domain names are turning into new identifies for communities, businesses and brands around the world. Marketing and branding business models are being redefined to align to new business identities," said Rinalia. There are now city gTLDs, she said, such as .tokyo, .osaka, .taipei, .guangzhou, .sydney and .doha. There are also community gTLDs such as .bank and .network. Brands are also seeing opportunity in gTLDs, with .samsung, .toyota, .honda, .temasek, and .tatamotors. all already snapped up. Siam Commercial Bank has snapped up the .scb domain as well, she noted.

Asia Pacific is still slow in adopting gTLDs, however. Rinalia said that only 18% of gTLDs rolled out so far are from this region. "Out of 127 delegated gTLDs, 43 are from Japan, 33 from China, 20 from Australia and New Zealand combined, 10 from UAE, seven from India, five from Singapore, three from South Korea, and one from Thailand," she said.

Rinalia also disclosed that ICANN expects to open further application rounds for new gTLDs in future. "This will be done after a comprehensive review of the programme is completed to ascertain neccessary improvements."

The programne also ushers in the first internationalised domain name (IDN) gTLDs. IDNs are domain names represented by letters or characters in different scripts and writing systems. They offer the possibility of using the Internet in different languages, including Thai, Chinese, Hindi and others, paving the way for a truly multilingual Internet with greater flexibility and opportunities for billions of users.

Source: The .bharat domain name was launched as part of the Digital India project. It is expected to accelerate local content delivery into India's remote and rural areas, and currently supports nine Indian languages in the Devanagari script.  

“There are more than 6,000 languages in the world of which about 50% are spoken in the Asia Pacific region. This diversity adds challenges to the Internet domain space, but with IDNs we allow for many of these languages to be represented,” said Sarmad Hussain, Senior Manager of ICANN’s IDN Program.

"Seventy-two percent of the world's Internet users do not have English as their native language and yet English which is written using Latin characters is the dominant Internet language. Many users struggle in using Latin characters to access Internet email. Some of them have to switch physical keyboards or toggle digital keypads in order to use Latin-based characters to type domain names. This makes it very difficult for them to use the Internet," elaborated Rinalia.

"IDNs are important because they support and complete a multilingual Internet. They make the Internet more inclusive for people with different writing systems around the world and they enable opportunies for local communities to come online in their own language."

IDNs still have challenges however, Rinalia said, listing a lack of awareness that it is even possible to have TLDs in a local script; a lack of content in the local script to drive local demand, and a dearth of community leadership and participation to engage in the multi-stakeholder collaboration required to make IDNs a success.

There are at present 61 IDN new gTLDs that have been launched and 47 IDN country code TLDs representing 37 countries and territories.

Interested?

Find out more about the new gTLDs at the ICANN website
Learn more about the IDNs at the ICANN website
Read the TechTrade Asia post on ICANN's IDN programme in Thailand