Digital Diwani: How India Lost Her Online Soul

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.

- TEJESH SRIVASTAV

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.

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.