Last week marked a significant milestone for the Neustar Registry team.

After many months of preparation, we announced the successful migration of the .IN ccTLD onto Neustar’s Registry platform. From now onwards, we’ll be partnering with the National Exchange of India (NIXI) as the new Technical Services Provider for India’s .IN domain.

We are excited to embark upon a “new age of success” for .IN. There is no doubt that the Indian digital economy in general, and the .IN namespace in particular, are uniquely positioned for significant growth and ripe for innovation.

India’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) recently published a report entitled “India’s Trillion Dollar Digital Opportunity”. The result of a year of research and consultation, the report forms part of the Digital India Programme, an enormous undertaking that “envisions the transformation of India in to a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy.” MeitY reports that “the existing digital ecosystem could contribute up to $500 billion of economic value, but the potential economic value for India could be as much as double that amount if digital technologies are used to unlock productivity, savings, and efficiency.”

Through the flagship Digital India Program, the Government of India is fully committed to the transformation of India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. And so is Neustar. Like NIXI, we are confident that the .IN domain can help to support the growth of India’s digital economy and the economic empowerment of millions of individuals and businesses in India.

Towards this end, we believe it is imperative to help take the Internet beyond India’s English speakers by supporting all 22 official Indian languages. As such, one of the first upgrades to take effect in .IN following the transition will be to directly improve the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) experience. Our new Registry web portal will allow Registrars to provide IDNs in their native script (no Punycode encoding required) from registration all the way to management and reporting of IDNs. This end-to-end local language support means intuitive IDN registration in your chosen script.

This kind of innovation is part of a larger program that we started at Neustar two years ago that led us to do a full upgrade of our Registry platform to take advantage of the latest technologies and security features. Among other things, we embarked on a largescale investment to update our global infrastructure by adding multiple layers of security and features to handle unusual traffic, attacks and denial of service events. This includes 30 new global DNS nodes, advanced threat mitigation services and an almost tenfold increase in our DDoS mitigation capacity, making us the largest player in the industry, with 10Tbps+.

This combination of ongoing innovation and industry-leading technical infrastructure is what makes Neustar unique, and are some of the reasons why NIXI entrusted Neustar with the privilege and responsibility of driving India’s digital domain into the future.

We are honoured to partner with NIXI and are confident that together we can support all Indian internet users with a fast, secure and accessible .IN. So while today we are celebrating a milestone, ultimately this is just the first step in what we trust will be a long and prosperous partne rship.

I’m incredibly proud to lead this Neustar Registry team, who have worked tirelessly during the last few months to make this successful transition a reality. We look forward to marking countless more exciting milestones and achievements for NIXI, the .IN domain and the people of India.