ICANN: Sarmad Hussain, Sr. Director, Internationalized Domain Names and Universal Acceptance Programs
For more than two decades, the technical community, ICANN, and volunteers around the world have been working together to internationalize the Domain Name System (DNS) to promote linguistic diversity on the Internet. Initially, this work has focused on the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) at the second level and eventually for top-level domains (TLDs). This has included the New Generic TLD (gTLD) Program, the largest expansion of the DNS to date as well as IDN country code TLDs (ccTLDs), making it possible for people around the world to connect with their communities through domain names in local languages and scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Devanagari.
To set the stage, I'm going to answer a few questions that come up frequently and may help you better understand the information in this new report (PDF Attached) on the current status of IDNs.
... Currently, 154 IDN top-level domains have been delegated in the root zone. There are 93 IDN gTLDs and 61 IDN ccTLDs currently delegated in the DNS root zone.
... According to the IDN Word Report, there have been a total of 8.3 million IDN registrations under ccTLDs and gTLDs, up from 2 million in 2010. With less than 2 million IDN registrations under the gTLDs, the majority โ approximately 77 percent of registrations โ are under ccTLDs.
read more (ICANN) / PDF Attached
For more than two decades, the technical community, ICANN, and volunteers around the world have been working together to internationalize the Domain Name System (DNS) to promote linguistic diversity on the Internet. Initially, this work has focused on the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) at the second level and eventually for top-level domains (TLDs). This has included the New Generic TLD (gTLD) Program, the largest expansion of the DNS to date as well as IDN country code TLDs (ccTLDs), making it possible for people around the world to connect with their communities through domain names in local languages and scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Devanagari.
To set the stage, I'm going to answer a few questions that come up frequently and may help you better understand the information in this new report (PDF Attached) on the current status of IDNs.
... Currently, 154 IDN top-level domains have been delegated in the root zone. There are 93 IDN gTLDs and 61 IDN ccTLDs currently delegated in the DNS root zone.
... According to the IDN Word Report, there have been a total of 8.3 million IDN registrations under ccTLDs and gTLDs, up from 2 million in 2010. With less than 2 million IDN registrations under the gTLDs, the majority โ approximately 77 percent of registrations โ are under ccTLDs.
read more (ICANN) / PDF Attached