About the IDN World Report

Objective

The IDN World Report is a project aimed at enhancing linguistic diversity online through Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs).  This site provides data, analysis and research on developments in IDNs to help raise awareness to linguistic diversity online.

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Background

The IDN World Report is a long-standing research project of EURid, UNESCO and other partners. The project started in 2011, and is supported by the regional ccTLD organisations CENTR, APTLD and LACTLD, and by numerous individual ccTLD registries who share data each year on their IDN technical deployment and experiences.

 

The IDN World Report is the initiative of EURid, who provides financial support for the research, editorial input and strategic direction for the project. EURid is committed to enhancing linguistic diversity in cyberspace and provides customer support and documentation in the European Union’s 24 official languages. To reflect the scripts used in the European Union, EURid has supported internationalised domain names (IDN) in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts at the second level under .eu since 2009. In the same year, EURid also applied to ICANN for the Greek and Cyrillic script equivalents of ‘eu’ at the top level. 2016 saw the launch of .ею (.eu in Cyrillic) and 2019 .ευ (Greek script).

 

In 2022, EURid signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ICANN which implies a stronger commitment for the two institutions to cooperate in supporting Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) and promoting the Universal Acceptance (UA). UNESCO is responsible for reporting on the implementation of WSIS action line C8 (Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content), and adopted the Recommendation concerning the promotion and use of multilingualism and universal access to cyberspace (2003). UNESCO is one of the founding partners of the IDN World Report.