• The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), organised an event on Universal Acceptance Day in New Delhi on March 28.

• The event themed ‘Connecting the Unconnected – Building a Multilingual Internet for Viksit Bharat’, aimed to accelerate the adoption of Universal Acceptance (UA) and create a more inclusive digital ecosystem in India.

• Universal Acceptance Day is a global initiative to promote the use of multilingual and inclusive internet technologies.

What is meant by Universal Acceptance?

Universal Acceptance (UA) ensures that all domain names, including new top-level domains (TLDs), Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), and email addresses are treated equally and can be used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems. UA is a fundamental requirement for a truly multilingual and digitally inclusive Internet. Achieving UA ensures everyone has the ability to navigate and communicate on the Internet using the domain name and email address that best aligns with their interests, business, culture, language, and script. Being UA-ready will help bring the next billion people online, many of whom currently face linguistic barriers to the Internet.

MeitY is working towards the implementation of a multilingual internet to enable all Indians to connect to and use the internet by ensuring that Internet domain names in languages other than English can be issued and used by all Internet enabled applications, devices and systems.

What is the purpose of NIXI?

NIXI is a not-for-profit organisation, established in 2003, for peering of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) among themselves and routing the domestic traffic within the country, with seed funding from the department of information technology.

NIXI is performing the following three activities:

1) Internet Exchange

The Internet Exchange Nodes have been successful in ensuring peering of ISPs among themselves for the purpose of routing the domestic traffic within the country, instead of taking abroad, thereby resulting in better quality of service (reduced latency) and reduced bandwidth charges for ISPs by saving on international bandwidth. As many as 77 Internet Exchange Nodes are functional across the country. The maximum volume of Internet traffic being handled by NIXI at present is 1.53 Tbps.

2) .IN Registry and Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs)

Since 2005, NIXI has managed the .in registry (www.registry.in). As many as 153 registrars have been accredited to offer ‘.in’ domain name registration worldwide to customers. This has helped proliferation of web hosting in the country and promotion of Indian language content on the Internet. ‘.in’ is India’s top-level domain on the Internet. Like ‘.com’, ‘.in’ can be used for email, websites, and other applications. Over 41 lakh ‘.in’ domain names have been registered till November 30, 2022. Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) in all 22 official languages are launched.

3) National Internet Registry (NIR)

Since March 2012, NIXI has been running the National Internet Registry (NIR) as Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN). IRINN is responsible for allocation of IP addresses and Autonomous System (AS) numbers within the country. As on November 30, 2022 over 4,483 affiliates have joined IRINN.

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