The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is seeking comments for the use of Indian languages in nine Indic scripts - Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu. These additions will allow domain names to include Indian languages. This is not entirely possible right now — having our domain name as மீடியாநாமா.காம், which is MediaNama.com in Tamil, wouldn't work because the root zone (which is the part of the internet that more or less sets the rules for what a domain name should look like) doesn't support Indian languages just yet. It is possible to have website names in a non-Latin script. For instance, गूगल.com does exist. But web browsers have to convert the URL from Unicode, which supports Hindi characters, to ASCII, which is a limited Latin character-set that mostly comprises the letters on the average English keyboard. This is done through something called 'Punycode', which converts non-Latin script domain names to ASCII. For instance, मीडियानामा.com would be converted to xn--e2boqcd4gbbdi.com. Samiran Gupta, head of India at ICANN, told MediaNama, "There would be no half measures, this would be the real thing." Internationalized domain names also include the part after the dot in a domain name. While India already has .भारत (dot Bharat) top-level domains (TLDs) and non-Devanagari counterparts, it's just the letters that constitute "भारत" that have been "delegated" into the root zone. The rest of the script still needs to be delegated, and that's what ICANN — in an effort led by the Neo-Brahmi script Generation Panel — is doing. Non-traditional…
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