English is the MAIN language of Business & Politics, you can see the interviews of all Cabinet Ministers of Ruling Govt. the speak in English. Few speak in domestic language to get appraised by their vote bank.

There are more then 1000 languages in India. As INDIA is growing, Indians has adopted ENGLISH very well many years ago.

South Indians don’t know the languages of North Indians
North Indians don’t know the languages of Eastern States
People from Eastern States of India don’t know the languages of South Indians. BUT Every INDIANS speak in ENGLISH in his/her office, even in Government Offices.

Access to Cable INTERNET is getting cheaper by every year. In 2001 It was INR 1200/- per month, now its only Rs.250/- per month. Hence more people have cable internet in their Homes. Even secondary school students.

There are many plus point I can write about India, Indians & its Economy but i’ll not bore you much!

Respectfully
Danish K.

I got directed here from a link on inForum….great post. I am wondering if there are other blog posts/ forum discussion comparing the relative attractiveness of various ccTLD’s. Please let me know.

Regards.
Madhav.

Under the INDRP (Indian equivalent of UDRP), the main requirement is that the domain name must be registered in good faith and with the intention to use the domain name for legitimate commercial reasons. That’s very similar to the UDRP.

In the Hotels.in case, there was a trademark on the term, the respondent was found to have no commercial purpose for registering the domain, and the respondent was found to have aggressively tried to sell the domain to the trademark holder.

To boot, and the final kiss of death in any legal case, the respondent was found to have made many misrepresentations to the Arbitrator.

I think that the take home points from that case are that if you are going to spend a lot of money on a domain, first check for trademarks. Second, it’s safer to put up a minisite than park a valuable domain. I’d say both of these are true of non-.in domains as well.

Also, Hotels.in was one of the earliest cases under the INDRP. IMHO, the reasoning in the decisions has improved considerably since then.

Great job Jeff & good on you Elliot for having guest writers when you can’t do a post yourself. Helps to spice things up a bit and have a different view of domaining from others.

I have been a Indian ccTLD investor since the beginning of 2007 and have close to 400 .co.in & .in one & two word generic domains.

I joined Jeff’s INForum.in mid 2007 and it has been of great help in getting use to the Indian domain space as many of the members are from India which helps with getting their viewpoint on how things are done there.

Every day I am researching and hand registering some great generic one & two word domain names that are relating to popular products or services in India & globally.

I always say that the internet is a numbers game and India has all the right numbers! As Jeff said with over 1.1 Billion people in the country it has huge room for growth over the next 5 to 10 years even if you did not count the large percentage of people who may not have the money to be on the internet. Cut the population in half and only work on 550 Million population and it is still 250 Million more than the US!

I say to other domainers, “ignore this sleeping giant at your peril” India will be one of the top three economic powers along with US & China its just a matter of time IMHO!

Regards

Ed Keay-Smith
http://www.ozdomainer.com

Can you elaborate:

“How can one protect oneself against getting generic .in domains taken away by local companies, such as the hotels.in case?”

Do you mean that hotels.in was stolen?