Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has signed agreements which gives it access to three top-level domain names for the company and its operations spread across oil and gas production, refining, petrochemicals, retail and telecommunications.
In April, RIL and its subsidiary—Affinity Names, Inc.—signed agreements with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the independent authority to offer licences for top-level domain names, to register for three main generic top-level domain names (gTLD). This essentially means that RIL now has the exclusive licence to use the three domain names: .ril, .reliance and .jio.
A web address or a domain name used to visit a certain website on the Internet usually has three main levels—top-level, second-level and third-level. For example, in the Web address www.ril.com, ‘.com’ is the top-level domain name, ‘ril’ is the second-level domain name and ‘www’ is the third-level domain name.
The Times of India reported on Friday that RIL is planning a shift to .jio from the current .com.
Incidentally, Jio is also the brand name of Ambani’s ambitious fourth-generation (4G) telecom service to be launched across India under the subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (R-Jio).
“Reliance group would like to acquire the gTLD .jio and use it actively as part of our corporate branding strategy, to make it easier for people to reach us on the Internet. A few of our corporate web sites, including those of different businesses and departments, will be housed under the .jio gTLD,” wrote Affinity Names in its agreement.
The mission statements of .ril and .reliance said the mission and purpose of the .ril and .reliance gTLD is to serve as a trusted, hierarchical and intuitive name space provided by RIL for use by the company, its qualified affiliates and trademark licensees.
The company, the statement said, will implement an internal process to determine which second-level domain names will be registered and which affiliates and trademark licensees will be eligible to register second-level domains.
“With buy-in from across the business, and the potential of the opportunity, it comes as no surprise that a few of the departments have plans to utilize the .jio gTLD for their businesses and departments. It is estimated that in the first year, we will issue and use up to 200 second-level domains for our different businesses and departments such as www.retail.jio, www.petroleum.jio, www.polymers.jio, and so on. This number will increase to 400 second-level domains in the second year and in the third year, around 600 second-level domains will be live,” the statement said.
R-Jio is planning to launch commercial telecom services across India in December 2015. The firm is planning to enter the market with an array of over-the-top Internet applications, which can diversify the company’s revenue base. Most of the applications will be woven around the Jio brand to give it more eyeballs, such as Jio Switch-and-Walk, Jio Drive, Jio Play, Jio Beats, Jio Mag, Jio Money, etc.
RIL also applied for a gTLD called .indian but withdrew it later on the request of the government.
According to ICANN’s website, Tata Sons Ltd, the holding company of the salt-to-software Tata group, applied for a gTLD in 2014 called .tata but as of July, the request is still pending.
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment