.IN is the Country Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) for India, which was delegated by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organisation) in 1989 ^[1].

The .IN ccTLD was initially delegated to the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) in 1989, and in 2002, NCST was merged into the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). The Government of India issued an executive order in 2004 to transfer responsibility for managing .IN domains to the newly created IN Registry under the authority of the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). The National Informatics Centre (NIC), ERNET, and the Ministry of Defence were appointed as registrars for the gov.in, res.in and ac.in, and the mil.in domains, respectively.

Technical Service Providers for the .IN Registry in the chronological sequence -

• Since 1989 and till 2007, NCST and C-DAC were running the .IN registry
• ‘Afilias Inc.’, a US corporation, was the first International Technical Service Provider (TSP) for .IN Registry and managed the .IN operations from 2007 till 2018
• ‘Neustar Inc.’, a US company, has provided TSP services to the .IN Registry since 2018. In 2020, GoDaddy acquired Neustar’s registry business and effectively became TSP for .IN Registry
• The migration to the new TSP, ‘Tucows Inc’, again an American entity, is under process

Internationalized Domain Names Country Code Top Level Domain
IDN ccTLDs (Internationalized Domain Names Country Code Top Level Domain) are specially encoded domain names that are displayed in an end-user application, such as a web browser, in their language-native script or alphabet, such as the Devanagari alphabet, or a non-alphabetic writing system, such as Chinese characters.

Apart from .IN (which is a ccTLD in the English language), 15 IDN ^[2] ccTLDs (i.e., in regional languages) have also been delegated to NIXI by ICANN (in various years) –