S. Ravindra Bhat, J.

The petitioner is aggrieved by the decision of the second respondent, the National Internet Exchange of India (hereafter "NIXI"), a not-for-profit organization incorporated under Section 25 of the Companies Act rejecting its tender/bid for Selection of Technical Service Provider for .IN Registry (hereafter "the service").

2. The Domain Name System ("DNS") acts as a phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly names into internet addresses, i.e. it maps a web address keyed in by a user to the appropriate webpage by routing it through the correct path. It is a naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called 'labels' separated by dots, (such as 'idea.com'). The rightmost label conveys the top-level domain ("TLD"), i.e. the domain name 'www.example.com' belongs to the top-level domain "com".

3. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") is the global regulatory body for the Internet's Domain Name System and Top-Level Domains; it develops policies for internationalization of the DNS system, introduction of new generic TLDs, etc. The standards applicable to the DNS are contained in a set of documents known as 'Request for Comments' or 'RFC Documents' published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (Internet standards). ICANN delegates the right to use a domain name to domain name registers, which are accredited by it. Every top-level domain (TLD) is maintained and serviced technically by an administrative organization, operating a registry (in India's case, the .IN Registry operated by NIXI). A registry is responsible for operating the database of names within its allocated zone. A registrant is one who seeks a domain registration. ICANN publishes the complete list of TLDs, TLD registries, and domain name registrars.

4. Text in computers, telecommunications equipment etc. are represented by the character encoding standard for electronic communication, i.e. the American Standard Code for Information Interchange ("ASCII"). ASCII was originally based on the English alphabet; it now encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers. Ninety-five encoded characters are printable: these include the digits 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, and punctuation symbols. In addition, the original ASCII specification included 33 non-printing control codes which originated with Teletype machines; most of these are now obsolete. The limited set of ASCII characters permitted in the DNS prevented the representation of names and words of many languages in their native alphabets or scripts. To facilitate this, ICANN approved the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications ("IDNA") system, by which user applications, web browsers, map Unicode strings into the valid DNS character set. In 2009 ICANN approved the installation of internationalized domain name country code top-level domains ("ccTLDs") and many registries of the existing top-level domain names have adopted the IDNA system.

5. The ".IN" is the top-level domain ("TLD") of India at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. Being a country code TLD ("ccTLD"), .IN domain is an India specific unique symbol. The .IN domain initially started with 6,500 registrations before it was re-launched in the January 2005 by Department of Information Technology ('DIT') now Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MITY the first Respondent). NIXI is authorized to operate and manage the .IN Registry. The primary objective of the re-launch was to establish a strong technical foundation and project .IN domain as a reliable and stable ccTLD. The .IN domain was well received in the market and in the first 90 days, registrations crossed the 100,000 mark. From its initially modest beginning, the .IN registrations have now crossed the 2.2+million registration mark