What is Universal Acceptance? India Tests Hindi URLs in Govt Sites

Azdhanon 4 minute read
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https://xn--i1b5bzbybhfo5c8b4bxh.xn--11b7cb3a6a.xn--h2brj9c/en

This URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is not a link to a spam website. It is the official link to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) of India. The Indian government recently began experimenting with URLs in the Hindi language under Universal Acceptance (UA), an internet ecosystem aimed at enabling the expansion of the Domain Name System (DNS) beyond the Latin-based alphanumerics of Unicode.

Unicode is an internet standard developed around the 1990s to address languages in a universal manner. Everything we see and type on the internet is a result of this standard. However, recent movements like Universal Acceptance (UA) endorse the inclusion of various languages other than English/Latin. As a part of this initiative, the Indian government has modified the MHA’s URLs into Hindi. The English URL (https://www.mha.gov.in/en) also continues to remain live alongside the Hindi URL.

What is Universal Acceptance (UA)?

“UA is a fundamental requirement for a truly multilingual and digitally inclusive Internet,” declares the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international non-profit organization entrusted with Internet Protocol (IP) address and Domain Name System (DNS) management. The aim of UA is to remove linguistic barriers for the next billion internet users.

The DNS translates numerical IP addresses into alphanumeric scripts, redirecting users to intended websites and ensuring emails are delivered to the correct address.

There are two main functions of Universal Acceptance:

  1. Top Level Domain Names:
    We have to share the International Domain Name (IDN), which has the regional script, with the website hosting server, as per the instructions given by BhashaNet,

    The server will have to route the incoming punycode to the desired website. Therefore, we can now have two URLs for the single website.

    Punycode is a way of encoding characters in non-ASCII scripts, such as regional languages, into the ASCII format. These characters are usually present on every QWERTY keyboard. So, the seemingly weird URL in the first paragraph is a Punycode that eventually decrypts into the desired regional language when pasted into a browser’s address bar.
  2. E-mail address:
    Similarly, email addresses in regional languages aim to increase the participation of non-English-speaking users in government programs, banking, and other applications, according to the Universal Acceptance India Program.

    However, neither the MHA nor the Government of India has officially launched email addresses in any regional language, including Hindi.

    The Hindi version of the India.gov.in website does not include any email addresses in Hindi. It only provides a contact form. On the other hand, the English version of the same website features the email address of the Web Information Officer in English, as usual.

What is the Status of UA now?

“NIXI (National Internet Exchange of India) has already started offering Indian language domain names in all 22 scheduled languages/scripts,” reads the report “Universal Acceptance and Inclusive Internet”, published by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in 2022 during Phase 1 of UA.

NIXI was set up to facilitate peering among ISPs, routing domestic traffic within the country instead of sending it to the US or other countries. This reduces latency and saves bandwidth costs for ISPs by minimizing international data flow.

NIXI’s subsidiary website, https://registry.in/, was established to assign ccTLDs (Country Code Top-Level Domains). For instance, India uses “.in” as its ccTLD. This site now welcomes domain names in Indian regional languages. The official UA Multilingual Report states that it supports all 22 scheduled Indian languages. However, Phase 2 of the UA report is yet to be published at the time of writing this article.

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Why does this matter?

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has long faced accusations of promoting Hindi imposition. Its recent National Education Policy, which mandates learning three Indian regional languages, has also been criticized for similar reasons.

The Indianization of government-owned URLs coincides with ongoing debates around the promotion and resistance to the Hindi language. Skepticism arises particularly because Hindi is the only language adopted so far under Universal Acceptance by the Ministry of Home Affairs, led by Amit Shah. This raises the recurring political question: Is Hindi India’s national or official language?

What Are the Security Concerns of Multilingual URLs?

The intention of UA to reduce the barriers of language by including non-English language is definitely a welcoming move. However, the implementation of the policy might raise a few security concerns that can potentially lead upto cyper-phishing A few of them are:

  1. Homograph attack: Remember Homophones? Homophones are words that are pronounced same but spelled differently and thus has a different meaning. Similarly, the websites with similar homoglyph (look-alike characters), URLs in reginal language may be used to cyber-attack the user.
  2. Typosquatting: Fake URLs that closely resemble real ones. Users may fall victim to these traps by making a minor typo.
  3. Semantic Attack: For example, Lamborghini might not have an official Indian domain, but someone could register https://लेम्बोर्गिनी.भारत/, potentially using it for phishing.
  4. Alternate Writing Style: A single word can be spelled differently in different regions. This is particularly true for Indian languages, which have diverse dialects.

Moreover, most devices (especially laptops) do not have Indic scripts hardwired into their keyboards. To address this, the UA Report suggests the government should encourage hardware manufacturers to produce devices with Indic characters inscribed on keyboards. This problem is relatively less significant with smartphones, which usually support multilingual typing.

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