Context: Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) and National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) have launched the BhashaNet Portal on the Universal Acceptance Day.
About BhashaNet Portal
BhashaNet Portal has been developed by NIXI and MEITY to develop an ecosystem to enable citizen to easily create, communicate, transact, process and retrieve information with ease in digital medium without language barrier.
- Encouraging use of local language website name and email id.
- Promoting awareness of local language url and email id.
- Developing policies and regulations.
- Supporting technical collaboration.
- Engagement of website owners, web-developer community, web security experts.
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
- These enable people to across the world to use domain names in local languages and scripts. IDNs are possible in all Indian languages since they are formed using characters from different scripts such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujrati or Tamil.
- Under the BhasaNet Portal, .Bharat is available in 22 Scheduled Languages.
Email address internationalization (EAI)
- It is the process of allowing email addresses to use non-ASCII characters, such as those used in languages like Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati or Tamil etc. in addition to traditional ASCII characters used in English-based email addresses.
- EAI uses Unicode encoding standard to represent non-ASCII characters in email addresses.
- Requires changes to the way that email is handled by both email clients and email servers to email clients to display non-ASCII characters in the user interface and email servers to be able to process non-ASCII addresses correctly.
- Technical standards to support EAI:
(i) SMTPUTF8: Allows email addresses with non-ASCII characters to be sent using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
(ii) IDNA2008: Allows domain names with non-ASCII characters to be translated into ASCII-based Domain Name System (DNS) used by the internet.
Universal Acceptance
- The basic idea behind Universal Acceptance is all domain names and all email addresses work in all software applications. It is a necessity for a truly inclusive internet to allow non-English speakers to access internet.
- Universal Acceptance is a foundational requirement for a truly multilingual internet in which all internet users across the world can navigate entirely in local languages.
- Essential for continued expansion of the internet and provides a gateway to the next billion internet users.
- Enables the private sector, government and societies to better serve their communities through the use of an increasing number of new domains, including non-Latin based,
Universal Acceptance Day
- Universal Acceptance Day is an awareness event celebrating the importance of ensuring that all domain names and email addresses can be used by all internet users.
- In 2023, India was host of the First Global UA Day as the flag bearer to promote and promulgate Universal Acceptance for digital inclusion.
- Global Universal Acceptance Day is scheduled to take place on March 28, 2024 in Belgrade, Serbia.
Universal Acceptance Guidelines
- Universal Acceptance Guidelines are a set of best practices and recommendations for supporting the use of all domains names and email addresses, regardless of their script, language or format.
- The guidelines for Universal Acceptance have been developed by Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), a community led initiative that works to promote Universal Acceptance of all domain names and email addresses.
- Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) is a community led initiative that was formed in 2015 and funded by ICANN. It works to raise awareness of the importance of UA globally, provide free resources to organisations to help them become UA-ready and measure the progress of UA adoption.