'I was always punished in school for day-dreaming..... Well I am living that dream all day now.'
Nearly 665 million Indians or 45 per cent of the rural population did not have access to the internet as of 2023. Difficulty in understanding internet procedures, insufficient awareness of its benefits, and a lack of interest have emerged as the top reasons for a gap in internet penetration in rural India, according to a joint report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar. "The proficiency of English in rural India is very low. While we have content in Hindi, the internet is English-heavy.
With Western corporations, including Microsoft, AWS and Oracle, shutting down their operations in Russia, the rest of the world has become acutely aware of its dependence on a clutch of technology service providers.
"In all cases it appears the impact was minor and the issues were quickly resolved," an ICANN spokesperson said.
'I have saved your name on my phone, but I cannot read or pronounce it.' 'I am able to recognise my wife's name today because after seeing it for so long, it has been imprinted in my mind as a picture and not the letters.'
By mid-2012, vernacular domain names in all 22 Indian languages may secure the approval of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Leading corporate houses like Reliance Industries, Airtel and State Bank of India have applied for use of word of their choice to replace .com, .net and the other usual suffixes on their website addresses.
The Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) decision to expand gTLD (generic top-level domain) names on the internet to include almost any name (even .anything), is foxing both users and registers. It has also raised fears of online trademark violations and cybersquatting.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which recently closed the process for its top-level domain programme, has received 28 applications from 15 Indian corporate houses.
In a "historic" move to make the world wide web fully live up to its name, the first Internet addresses to use non-Latin characters have been launched for the first time.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, has set the ball rolling for web addresses in scripts other than Latin. This will allow uniform resource locators, as web addresses are called in virtual parlance, in languages other than English, including Hindi, Tamil or Bhojpuri.
On its behalf, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), responsible for creating domain endings like .com or .org, is in the process of developing a whole bunch of new endings, including .eco, a statement from the WWF said.
Nearly 40 years after the virtual world started, companies and individuals will be able to apply for any address on the Internet and not be limited to just the 21 suffixes like .com (accounting for 80 per cent), .net and .info or country-specific appendages like .in for India.
India on Thursday expressed reservations over control of crit ical internet resources like allocation of domain names by a US contracted entity, saying this cannot really be reflective of the international character or community of internet users.
The humble .com is set to receive some competition from a new set of unusual web addresses such as .guru and .singles!
Recognising the threat posed by outfits like the Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Tayiba and the Dawood Ibrahim network, India and the United States have agreed to deepen cooperation in fighting terrorism and asked Pakistan to bring to justice the 2008 Mumbai attack perpetrators.
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