An internet for India, in India, by India.

New Delhi: The internet (Web 2.0) as we know is about to be disrupted by the “New Internet” also known as the dWeb (Decentralised Web). One of the fundamental building blocks of the internet is its “namespace”. Top Level Domains (TLDs) such as.com, .org, .in, and others make up the existing namespace. For example, in the name "google.com, the phrase "google" is the name, and ‘.com’ is the TLD. However, this technology is now obsolete and only relevant to domain owners. 

In the old internet your online digital ids are assigned to you as user names by centralised corporations such as Google and Facebook. In the dWeb, your user Id belongs to you and is something you control, thus in the dWeb namespace is something that is of interest to everyone. As the namespace evolves, it is critical that it evolves in a way that is inclusive and meets the needs of all Indians, particularly those who speak their mother tongue as their first language. 

Agaamin, a Gurgaon-based start-up, is attempting to solve this problem by developing an "Indian internet." Agaamin will launch "Smart Names" in all of India's vernacular languages. Hindi is the first language to be introduced and will be soon followed by others. The “Smart” TLD will go live on January 1, 2022, at 00:00 hours. It will be a single Hindi alphabet in Devanagari script. The alphabet will be the sound “bha” for Bharat. 

Sajan Nair, the founder of Agaamin, spoke about their plans for the future of namespace in India. “. The first TLD will support both Hindi and Marathi. Other languages will be added soon, after which we will look at emojis. Soon smart names will be your digital id and they will be just as significant as your phone number. 

Some of the immediate ways in which you can use your smart names are: - 

1- Your unique name for your avatar in the metaverse. 

2- It can be your unique wallet address just like your phone number is for UPI. 

3- A domain name for your website. 

4- It will be your universal log into all the Apps on the new internet. 

5- It’s an investment as a Non-Fungible Asset. 

Apart from the registration of names, plans are also afoot for a secondary market where users can buy and sell their smart names. Speaking about the future of dWeb and namespace in particular Sajan said, “dWeb is going to disrupt literally everything on the internet. Creating an early Dweb infrastructure in India means giving a head start to 1/6th of the human race”.

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