The government, through Rudiantara, the Minister of Communication and Information, plans on allocating Rp 50 billion to support and encourage the utilization of .id domain in Indonesia. By increasing the number of .id domain users, Indonesia is expected to use less international bandwidth in the future.

Rudiantara explained that the fund will be included into the Ministry’s budget plan for next year. By that much of money, the government would be able to provide at least one million free .id domains for the people, thus converting them from .com to .id.

“We recommend people to use .id. Therefore, we plan this free .id domain program instead of getting confused for next year’s plan,” he said.

All this time, the price for any .id domain is various. For .co.id domain, the price may reach Rp 100.000 per year, while any .id domain costs Rp 500.000. Nonetheless, Rudiantara believes that the price can be compressed up to Rp 50.000 per domain, as it might go down due to the massive quantity the government plans to spend on.

“The most important point is that the mechanism can be turned into public domain. So, we may spend that Rp 50 billion in installments or any other way. Rather than spending it on unproductive programs, it’s better to spend our Rp 50 billion for web.id. I’m not saying that the current programs are not qualified,” Rudiantara stated, as Kompas reported.

So far, according to Pandi, the utilization of .id domain had increased 21 percent in 2014. The latest data taken in last March showed that there were 131.488 registered .id domains.

To Rudiantara, the program isn’t a waste. He perceived that by converting users to .id domain, the government may reduce the consumption of international bandwidth.

“There should be someone who calculates the saving, how much international bandwidth can be saved upon the implementation of our aftermarket policy,” he concluded.

Rudiantara also revealed that the Rp 50 billion is relatively small, compared to the total money that goes to international bandwidth, which may even reach hundreds of billion rupiahs. Besides saving more bandwidth, the program is also expected to help people getting better quality and access speed.