By: Ajay Data, Founder, XGen Plus
Every good thing comes to an end so as in this evening GCCS comes to end with the final closing speech by Sushma Swaraj, our Ministry of External Affairs. GCCS was inaugurated by our Hon'ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23rd Nov 2017. The biggest cyber conference in the world comes to an end with an overwhelming response & participation of over 20 IT Ministers, senior delegates from over 139 countries, together aiming to have Cyber informed citizens.
Cyber is not a technology world, it means "steering and governance" , it is actually taken out of a Greek word and I must tell you that GCCS conference is a milestone for Internet and Technology in India as lot of policy discussions happened around security concerns, digital enablement, internet policy framework, Indic languages, identity, India as Product Nation etc. It is expected that government will come out with a policy which is conducive to the growth of the country and empowering citizens with much more rights over data and information.
It was also discussed to use .भारत for tapping the biggest opportunity available in India to address non-English population as the country has huge population who do not know English but knows their native language very well.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on said the nation should ensure that digital space does not become a playground of dark forces. I think he was hinting at 'darkweb'. This can be considered to be the beginning of difficult time for cybercriminals and hackers.
Personally, It was great to speak on Universal Acceptance where I shared that all the domain addresses and email addresses must be treated equally. This means in Legacy systems the expectations are for three characters domain names whereas the expectations are that new systems to accept 2 to 63 character domain names. It is also expected to accept and validate domain names containing non-ASCII characters.
It was also discussed to use .भारत for tapping the biggest opportunity available in India to address non-English population as the country has huge population who do not know English but knows their native language very well. They have no opportunity right now to leverage the Internet benefits and get online to use e-commerce and other services it is now possible to provide a domain name for your website in the language user wants and so as the email addresses in that language i.e राजस्थान.भारत website can serve all Hindi population and संपर्क@राजस्थान.भारत email address can act as a communication medium to connect with citizens who do not know English.
Govt of India is making policy around that and likely to be announced soon.
The event was attended by ICANN, ISOC, IAMAI, ISPIRT, UNESCO etc which shows that global and Indian think tanks participated and contributed in the discussion of the Cyberspace. Apart From Govt and Industry leaders leaders, Speakers like Sharad Sharma (iSpirt), Shradha Sharma (Yourstory), Lalitesh (MapMaker), Debyani Ghosh (Nasscom), Maarten & Samiran (ICANN), Olaf (ISOC) , Prasanto Roy (Nasscom) and Dr. Shubo Ray (IAMAI) gave some deep insights on various challenges, opportunities and food for thought to the audience.
At the end #DigitalInclusion, #DigitalAccess and #DigitalSecurity became the important signpost for #CyberSpace and I can say that Govt of India mainly represented by our Hon'ble Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Sh. Ravi Shanker Prasad and his team has shown an exemplary leadership by bringing GCCS in India and made a very impressive show in front of the other nations. Certainly, this event can be considered as India's growing power in the World.
