The mango that broke a market
It is peak mango season in India. The Alphonso harvest is at its richest, the Kesar at its most fragrant.
In a May 2017 letter to The Economist, I highlighted India’s vernacular digital divide – how e-commerce companies limit themselves to English-speaking Indians while ignoring 1.2 billion potential vernacular users. But this language problem is merely a symptom of a deeper malaise: India’s systematic surrender of its digital sovereignty through the wholesale transfer of culturally significant domain names to foreign hands and all for a pittance – a fraction of their true value.
The New East India Company: The parallels to our colonial past are striking. Just as the East India Company’s Robert Clive secured the Diwani – the right to collect revenue from Bengal – for a private British entity in 1765, today’s “Domain Giants” like GoDaddy and Sedo have facilitated a modern extraction of India’s digital assets. The difference is that this time, Indian intermediaries are willing participants in the plunder. Consider the scale of what we’ve lost. When MicroStrategy sold Voice.com for $30 million in 2019 – the largest publicly disclosed domain sale in history – it demonstrated the astronomical value of premium digital real estate. Yet India’s own cultural crown jewels have been sold for fractions of their worth.
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The Tragic Flippers: Take an unnamed individual, often called the “father” of India’s domain investment community. His investment philosophy reveals our national tragedy. “Don’t get greedy,” he advises fellow domainers. “If a domain is fetching you good returns, flip and invest the proceeds in acquiring more, better names.” This flip-and-exit mentality has seen culturally resonant domains sold to foreign buyers for literally pennies. These transactions, while moderately profitable for individuals, represent a catastrophic loss of collective digital heritage.
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The one exception proves the rule. When Rajesh Jain sold IndiaWorld to Sify for $115 million in 1999, he wasn’t selling disconnected domain names but a comprehensive digital ecosystem built around vernacular terms like samachar.com (news), khel.com (sports), and bawarchi.com (cook). It was India’s only “fair” valuation precisely because it was designed for the Indian diaspora, not the domestic market. Tragically India never saw another Rajesh Jain! Untapped Goldmine: The greatest tragedy lies not in what was sold but at the pathetic valuations at which these linguistic culturally resonant jewels were given away.
This neglect stems from colonial linguistic hierarchies – the very word “vernacular” derives from the Latin verna, meaning “home-born slave.” For over a century, it denoted the perceived inferiority of Indian languages relative to English. This psychological barrier persists in the digital realm, where English domains are seen as premium and vernacular ones as provincial. Contrast this with China’s approach. While India conducted a chaotic “first come, first served” digital land grab, China constructed a fortress.
The .cn domain boasts 22 million registrations compared to India’s 3 million for .in. Chinese investors like Cai Wensheng, the “domain king,” understood strategic value – he famously acquired Bharat.com and declared it worth “millions of dollars,” refusing all offers to sell. When Chinese company Qihoo 360 paid $17 million for 360.com, it wasn’t acquiring foreign digital territory but upgrading within its protected domestic ecosystem. China’s state-controlled approach, while restrictive, has built immense domestic value rather than exporting it abroad. India’s digital sovereignty requires urgent intervention, starting with a fundamental rejection of the colonial mindset that devalues our linguistic heritage. We must stop sheepishly accepting that Hindi domain names with Indian names in them like ‘dawa’ or ‘taka’ are niche and therefore not to be valued as Western names. This is linguistic colonialism disguised as market reality.
A domain’s value should not be determined by its appeal to English-speaking global investors but by the population it can serve, its perfect match with local businesses, its inherent brandability in its native script, and the profound emotional connection it creates with users who think and dream in that language. When 600 million Indians speak Hindi and hundreds of millions more understand it, a premium Hindi domain is not “niche” – it’s addressing a market larger than the entire population of Europe. When a Bengali domain connects with 300 million Bengali speakers globally, it’s not “specialized” – it’s serving a market larger than the United States. We need new valuation frameworks that recognize linguistic reach as legitimate market size.
An Indian domain name with ‘paisa’ or ‘beema’ or ‘yojna’ must be valued by its potential to serve India’s massive banking population in their preferred language, not dismissed because global speculators can’t pronounce it. Investment in vernacular domains requires patient capital and deep market development—the antithesis of the flip mentality that has dominated our digital landscape. We need entrepreneurs who understand that building a business around kitaab for book lovers isn’t just commerce – it’s cultural preservation and linguistic empowerment. A Digital Swaraj: The domain name market will continue to be global and commercial. But India can choose whether to be a strategic player or remain a source of raw materials for foreign value creation.
The difference between China’s billion-dollar domestic digital economy and India’s niche market status illustrates what happens when digital sovereignty is treated seriously versus casually. We are at a crossroads. The premium English.com names representing our culture are largely gone, exported for modest sums during our digital adolescence. But the vast territory of the vernacular web remains largely unsettled.
The question is whether the next generation of entrepreneurs and policymakers will learn from our digital Plassey, or repeat it. The time for digital Swaraj is now. We must reject the colonial valuation metrics that dismiss our languages as niche and instead build a digital ecosystem that speaks to India in India’s own voices. Our cultural identity deserves domains valued not by London market standards, but by the hearts and minds they can touch in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and every village in between.
(The writer is an entrepreneur and commentator on India’s digital economy. He is a Chartered Accountant and holds an MBA from Cornell University. He can be reached on LinkedIn- https://www. linkedin.com/in/tejesh-srivastav-487b7310/)
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