All posts in Indian Domain Names

Some very positive new statistics about the use of the internet in India have been released.  12% or 49 million people are now connected to the internet, with about 35 million of them using the internet at least once per month.

Not surprisingly, the majority of internet users are young – 77% are between the ages of 19 to 35. Surprisingly, India’s net user demographics cuts evenly across socio-economic class.

What’s most interesting about these statistics is the language preference:  “over 70% prefer to access the net in Indian languages, with English users at just 28%, down from 41% in 2007.”  To me, this shows what I’ve been saying all along, which is that people prefer to access the internet in their native language, even if they know English.  This bodes well for IDNs in India.

Foreign direct investment is not allowed in the Indian retail industry, unless it is for a single brand store.  To get around this, in early 2007 Walmart and the well established Indian retailer the Bharti Group have partnered up.  Under this agreement, Walmart is the “wholesaler” who provides the goods that the Bharti Group retails.  The partnership does business under the name Bharti Wal-Mart Pvt. Ltd.

Unfortunately, despite being multi-billion dollar companies, they did not think to secure domains with their name in it.  As a result, a cybersquatter, Somesh Gupta from Bangalore registered the domains BhartiWalMart.in and Bharti-Wal-Mart.com.

Bharti Wal-Mart Pvt. Ltd. brought action against the cybersquatter in the Delhi High Court.  The court has made an order restraining the cybersquatter from using the domain names.

It’s not clear to me why Bharti Wal-Mart decided to take action via the High Court rather than the UDRP and INDRP – perhaps combining both domains into one case was more convenient.

Pravin Anand is known as the leading IP lawyer in India. So, I’m very excited and thankful to Mr. Anand for taking some time out of his busy schedule to clarify the often mysterious law regarding domains in India. You can find a brief biography of Mr. Anand here. You can also find out more about Mr. Anand’s legal career and how he got into intellectual property law in this interview by Halsbury India.
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Via Sahar’s blog, I found these two beautiful photographs promoting the .in space:

Very good marketing and a creative way of promoting what, to the average person, must seem quite bland.

INForum has just launched the LLL.in Sales Report Thread.  So far, the market seems to be all over the place with no clear patterns.  However, the recent LLL.in buyout definitely has increased the value of these domains.  Keep track of the latest sales of LLL.in domains in this thread.  And, if you know of any sales, please let us know.

Today I received a copy of the following email:

From: VeriSign Customer Service [mailto:info@verisign-grs.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 4:02 PM
To: info@verisign-grs.com
Subject: Advisory: Notice of Fee Change

March 27, 2008

VIA Email and Express Delivery

Re: Notice of  Fee Change

To All Registrars,

VeriSign, Inc. and it’s wholly owned subsidiaries (“VNDS”) is hereby notifying all registrars of a fee change for .com and/or .net domain names effective October 1, 2008.  In accordance with our contract, ICANN has already been
notified.  Details as follows:

1. VNDS’ fee for each annual increment of a new and renewal .com domain name registration and for each transfer of a .com domain name registration from one ICANN-accredited registrar to another will be US $6.86, exclusive of
any ICANN Variable Registry-Level Fee (as defined in the .com Registry Agreement) or any other ICANN fee; and

2. VNDS’ fee for each annual increment of a new and renewal .net domain name registration and for each transfer of a .net domain name registration from one ICANN-accredited registrar to another will be US $4.23, exclusive of
any ICANN Variable Registry-Level Fee (as defined in the .net Registry Agreement) or any other ICANN fee.

Except for the above-described fee changes, all other terms of the relevant agreements (.com and .net Registry Agreements and Registry-Registrar Agreements) remain unchanged.

Please contact Customer Affairs Office at cao@verisign-grs.com if you have specific questions regarding this notice.

Best regards,

PJ Bolanos
Vice President, Customer Support
VeriSign, Inc.
info@verisign-grs.com

I’ve been looking at the data from Registry.in and I think the pace of .in registrations have increased 50% during 2007

Bear with me while I do some maths and show you why:

Part 1

February 21, 2005: Registration for ‘.in’ domain crosses 75,000

November, 2006: Registration for ‘.in’ domain crosses 250,000

So it took from Feb. 2005 to Nov. 2006 to increase from 75,000 to 200,000.

125,000 domains in 655 days (approx.) means 190 per day.

Part 2

From November last year to June this year, prenatal vitamins there were:

50,000 domains in 180 days (approx.) means 277 per day.

The pace of .in registrations has increased 50% in the last 6 months.

(I’m no maths genius – feel free to point out if I made any mistakes here)

2007 is likely to be the last year when the Internet in India remains relatively small business. Now is a great time to consider getting involved and making sure that your company has your .in and .co.in names!

The Indian government is getting ready to expand free wireless broadband across the whole country. Currently figures estimate that the number of Indians online will increase from 45 million in 2006, to reach 67 million in 2007 and 147 million by 2010. The possibility exists for even more rapid growth

Are Indian domain names valuable?

Absolutely.  So far there have been around 100 sales of Indian domain names for 1000 USD or more.

So far in 2007, we’ve already seen several large sales, with Linkshare.in selling for 19,755 USD, Blackjack.in for 5,255 USD, Mobilephones.in for $3,320, MWV.in for $2000. All of these sales were handled by Sedo.com, a leading online marketplace for domains.

Increasingly, major companies see building a website for the Indian market as very important. Having a domain name that makes it clear the company operates in India is an important part of that strategy.

Which extension should I choose? .co.in / .in / .com ?

The Indian government is currently promoting the Indian domain name extension by the slogan:

“Wake up to the power of the official Indian web address. Switch to www.yourcompanyname.co.in”. To get www.yourcompanyname.co,in, log on to www.registry.in”

Even the Indian government is using .in although it is advertising .co.in!

Companies such as Goggle and Yahoo prefer the .co.in extension, whereas some Indian  companies such as Rediff still use .com. Rediff use its .in and .co.in to advertise overseas, particularly to Indians living in the United States.

In the long term, there is little doubt that .in and .co.in will win out in India. With the exception of the United States, almost every country in the world embraces its own extension. British people love .co.uk, Germans love .de, Australians love .com.au and so on.

What about Indian language domains?

Is it possible to visit Indian language domain names? Yes, in .com and .net currently.

The Indian government is getting ready to launch .in domain names in Indian languages. Tamil and Malayam are planned for 2007 with other languages to follow soon afterwards.

Now is the time to make sure your company has your .in and .co.in names!

To find out more, please visit www.inforum.in.