The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) published the 2022 Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Annual Report. The report provides an overview of the status of IDNs at the top and second levels of the Domain Name System (DNS), as well as the IDN-related work being done by the ICANN organization (ICANN org) and community. The report states that there has been reduction in overall IDN registrations among gTLDs year on year. This will be interesting to consider with the publication of the next IDN World Report expected in April 2023 as it will include statistics on ccTLDs. The following are some selected points from the ICANN report. The full report is available here.
Of the 1481 TLDs delegated 152 are IDN TLD (61 ccTLDs and 91 gTLDs).
As of December 2022, at the second level, there are 1.52 million IDN registrations across all gTLDs, a 2.9% reduction from the previous year.
The report includes some examples of IDNs used in various sectors such as governments and businesses around the world (eg. official website of the Indian Government’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is an IDN in the Hindi language and Devanagari script, एमईआईटीवाई.सरकार.भारत).
IDN projects active within ICANN org in 2022 include: (1) Root Zone Label Generation Rules (RZ-LGR), (2) Second-Level Reference Label Generation Rules , (3) LGR Tool, and (4) IDN Implementation Guidelines. More details on these projects can be found in the report.
There were no IDN ccTLD String Evaluation Requests received in 2022.
The IDN TLDs delegated to date represent 37 languages in 23 scripts.
Half of the IDN registrations [gTLDs] are in the Chinese script, followed by the Latin script with approximately a quarter of the registrations.
A total of 26 unique scripts are currently supported in the root zone.
ICANN org conducted 323 IDN table reviews for 281 TLDs through the IDN Service of the Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) Process and Registry System Testing (RST) in 2022.
462 TLDs list their IDN tables in the IANA Repository. A total of 13,980 IDN tables are published across all gTLDs and ccTLDs. 7,320 are script-based IDN tables and 6,660 are language-based IDN tables.
