PANDI and Devotion to Domain .id
The ownership of domains in Indonesia is not quite many. From 200 million domain names in internet, only 250 are registered in Indonesia. From that number, only 58 thousands use .id domain, or about only 23%. This is the fact stated by the new PANDI chairman, Andi Budimansyah. PANDI wants the increasing number of .id domain users from Indonesia.
It is not easy to get users’ interest in Indonesia to use .id in comparison to world-wide domains like .com, .net, or .org. There is also a trend to use domain as a part of the brand name or a word. PANDI realized that one of the reasons is the hard way to register .id domain. You should know the way around when you register .com domain, it needs not more than 5 minutes only.
One step that will be taken by PANDI, as stated in Tempo Interaktif, is the second level domain .my.id offering for free. Other than that, it is predicted that next year, PANDI has been able to offer any domain name including brand name, especially for corporation, with a premium price. The domain name .my.id is free and can be the point of interest for costumers, but for the future, we should learn how other nation love their own domain.
Based on my observation, there are some countries in which their people proud to use their own domain name such as Germany (.de), Canada (.ca) and Japan (.jp). What do they have? Their registry gives access to top level domain in each countries for personal, community, or cooperation needs. It means that we can get dailysocial.de, dailysocial.ca or dailysocial.jd if we live in one of the countries mentioned.
Why we finnaly end up with dailysocial.net? Not dailysocial.co.id? Well.. we can afford it, but to do so, we need SIUP or Company Certificate, NPWP (Tax Registeration), trademark (if any), and ID card of the registration caretakers; though the cost is not too high, for company who has already be corporation since the establishment, the process will be easier, but if it is not, the process to get local domain should wait the legalization process first. It takes much time.
In the past, people who want to get .id domain will get second level domain .web.id. For me, the name is not appealing. The name is not catchy and do not focus on .id as an identity. I want to give an extreme suggestion but look at three countries I mentioned before, why don’t we ask for .id domain for everyone? Just imagine the name dailysocial.id. It is more catchy than dailysocial.co.id or dailysocial.web.id, then we can feel the stronger identity of our nation. Based on my observation, there are some countries in which their people proud to use their own domain name
How about todays structure, for example go.id, ac.id, co.id? Do they need to change? If we learn from Singapore, this kind of transition is not a big problem. They were like us. They used second domain level like that, but recently more people use .sg domain. I think government offices and schools or universities still need to use those nomenclatures, but personal users or corporation will get privilege for the new scheme.
Thus, the process of getting .id should be easier because it has already through globally competent registrar or reseller. Anyone in the world can get this domain. May be it is better to have the regulation of local and foreign sales. The premium price will not be a big problem since it will be a new income for foreign exchange. In addition, .id is identically with “identity” that many people will be interested. However, I hope that more Indonesian will have this domain.
I think, the rest is about bureaucracy. How PANDI can work together with the Ministry of Communication and Technology so that this “precious idea” can be real. Why don’t we work together to introduce our .id domain to foreign people while we grow Indonesian people love to local domain? Let’s support the idea of PANDI’s new organizer!