India now runs Afghanistan’s internet. Afghanistan’s status as India’s cyber colony is undisputed, uncontroversial and unchallenged.
Undisputed too is the upcoming colonisation of Pakistan’s online identities and internet infrastructure in Urdu and Punjabi. No launch date is set for these initiatives, expected within a year.
What will subordination give Delhi? Power to block internet addresses in Urdu and Punjabi. Fees to maintain the same. Corporate registration of brands in India. Indian courts as dispute venues. Indian laws interfering with commercial transactions and private speech.
Pakistani companies, through their internet presence, will increasingly promote India as a business destination and global brand. Pakistan will not disappear, but its visibility will be subsumed. Within Pakistan, the digital divide will widen between English-speakers and the rest of a nation forced to depend on India for access to the internet in Urdu and Punjabi.
What future awaits Pakistani companies? They will be required to append .Bharat to their internet identities when doing business in Urdu and putting up websites with addresses accessible in Urdu. In Punjabi, .Bharat must also be used, but only Gurmukhî script is allowed.
Branding with .Bharat is problematic because the extension is considered local (to India) and downgraded in internet search results outside of India. The same is true for .PK country-code domains. If you want your website to rank highly in global search results, global top-level domains such as .Com or .Net outrank country-code domains, including .Bharat.
How Urdu is used online will soon be under Delhi’s control. Their babus can ban everyone from using any word, letter or phrase in their names in Urdu in their online identities. Write Urdu differently than they do in Delhi? Too bad.
The sole route to obtaining an online address in Urdu will be under the control of Indian officials and their friends. In initial releases of .IN domains, these cabals captured the most valuable properties for themselves. In the land rush for the best online Urdu real estate, Pakistan will miss the premium properties. Any that are obtained are vulnerable to takings because India owns the registry.
For example, a spice wholesaler that secures AllSpices.Bharat in Urdu may find that brand taken a year later by an Indian company with better connections in Delhi. Customers in Europe who go online to buy spices from AllSpices.Bharat could suddenly find themselves trading with an Indian outfit.
Let’s look at specifics.
India has surged ahead in building its domain name system or DNS, which controls website addresses, e-mail addresses, and the languages and characters that can appear in those addresses. By 2015, even under modest forecasts for growth, India will add at least 15 million additional internet domains to the two million held today.
Pakistan currently has less than 40,000 domains registered under its own .PK country code extension. According to ratings maintained by www.domainsindex.com/ratings.php the ratio of Pakistan’s internet users to the number of second-level .PK domains is 1,321 to 1, the most extreme in the world after Nigeria. European studies find national economic growth and growth of the DNS system to be highly correlated.
Permissions for top-level domains (TLDs such as .Com) are granted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). On January 12, 2012, ICANN opens a three-month window for applications for new TLDs and translations of existing TLDs into other languages.
The 2012 window is the first in seven years and is not expected again for another seven. Approvals could take three years. Application fees are $ 185,000. Bonding and implementation expenses could push total costs to $ 2 million per TLD.
Economies of scale can be achieved when applications for different languages are submitted together. In Quebec, an effort is being made to enable internet access entirely in French. Two applications for character sets in French (with and without accent marks) will be filed. The extensions will be administered as a unified identity, reducing costs. If Quebec’s example were to be followed in Pakistan, the registrant of AllSpices.aaj or AllSpices.aap (or whatever extension is chosen) in English would automatically be provided with equivalent domains in Sindhi, Punjabi, Urdu and other national languages and in the character sets (scripts) of those languages. The branding of a nation is the sum of its national brands. Pakistan’s export-oriented companies were late to register premium .Com domains. They were left with unwieldy, less attractive ones that others do not want.
Pakistan faces a branding crisis. Companies need to jettison product and service names that resemble more recognised global brands belonging to others. Mimicking damages all brands in Pakistan. No amount of paid advertising can fix this problem.
Branding in Pakistan needs to be reinvented en masse. Brands need to stand out on their own — and make their own claims for recognition, trust and international prominence. Country code and English-only .Com domains do not allow this. Rather than trying to fix broken brands, it would be cheaper and quicker to start fresh with a new global top-level domain. New solutions and new TLDs are needed. Instead of repeating DNS features and functionalities that are decades old and largely restricted to displaying websites and sending e-mail, Pakistan’s new DNS infrastructure could look to the future.
Ecommerce, telephony, security, and privacy features can be built into new TLDs. Or rather, TLDs could be opened to encourage Pakistan’s vibrant IT industry to build advanced features into new internet infrastructures.
Integration with telephony and internet banking could subsidise all aspects of a TLD so that every person could be given their own domain, forever, free — thereby giving everyone their own virtual home online. Functions performed in personal computers and smart phones could be moved into the DNS system, which is safer, faster and more secure — especially when accompanied by voice recognition and biometric identification. China Mobile is building a mobile payment system for .Tel domains. .Tel already enables domain-to-domain calling for mobile handset users in a variety of languages, heralding a future where we communicate on the basis of our personal identities — rather than telephone numbers.
Pakistan will experience an internet boom if full internet access is enabled in languages other than English. That boom, and the status of Pakistan’s new brands, will be expanded if additional languages and scripts are included as part of a unified TLD system. Simplified and traditional Chinese, Arabic and even Devanagari could be added in phases to make the TLD the most desirable location on the internet.
The alternative? Ceding portions of the internet to New Delhi is the least attractive option and currently the most likely.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]