Can India take advantage of the new generation Internet protocol from ICANN?
Prabash Sachdev, Special Correspondent
July 21, 2004

Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers announced the new IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol from IPv4. The Internet will explode in the coming years with this protocol and technology. The technology allows flexibility, speed and mobility. According to experts, the mobile technology and the new Internet technology will make today’s Internet look primitive. 

Unfortunately, while India is busy supplying bodies for outsourced software projects, her representation in ICANN is inadequate. The big players plan to follow the leadership of ICANN and wait till commercialization effort is complete. While that may make sense from business side, India may have lost a big opportunity in influencing the future Internet in its favor. Chinese have proactively participated and have made sure that Chinese character based domain names can be used in future. 
"This next-generation version of the Internet protocol, IPv6, provides trillions more addresses than the IPv4 system that is in use by most networks today," the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said in a statement. The US Department of Commerce awarded ICANN the task of coordinating the Internet’s naming and numbering system globally, and rapid growth in the use of the World Wide Web had raised fears about a future scarcity of Internet protocol addresses. "By taking this significant step forward in the transition to IPv6, ICANN is supporting the innovations through which the Internet evolves to meet the growing needs of a global economy," said ICANN, which is holding its six-day annual conference in Malaysia. "Every atom in the universe will now get an address. I don’t see a problem with IPv6 running short of domain addresses," US Internet expert John Klensin told AFP. On the development of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), Klensin, the former chair of the Internet Architecture Board, said there were serious technical problems in creating domain names in local language characters. The problems include regional variations in characters in languages such as Chinese and the fact that some languages such as Arabic are written from right to left as opposed to left to right in English. But Kieran Baker, ICANN''s general manager said the meeting was expected to provide "some conclusions on how we can more forward."