Each year, we track the state of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) registrations, technical readiness, and what the industry thinks about adoption. Here are some of the key findings from this year:

Japan entered the commercial Internet as a high-income, technologically advanced society whose writing practices did not map cleanly onto ASCII hostnames. That made it an unusually important early case in the development of Internationalized Domain Names. This article follows a paradox: Japan helped pioneer practical Japanese-language domain deployment early, yet early leadership did not displace ASCII naming conventions.

In our hyper-connected world, we often take for granted that the internet "just works." But for millions, the digital door remains locked, not because of a lack of signal, but because the web wasn’t built for their language.