EURid registry, which operates the all-European domain .EU, released a report on internationalized domain names’ development trends. The document highlights the importance of internationalized domains (IDNs) in transforming the Internet into a truly multilingual and multicultural space. It is accentuated that creation of hybrid domains (which are composed of ASCII characters but allow registration of internationalized names on the second or third level) is only a half-measure and is incapable of solving the problem. This step is quite convenient for citizens of the countries, whose languages are based on Latin alphabet. However, it doesn’t assist people speaking Arabic or Chinese, because it requires them not only to speak their own language but also to at least know the Latin alphabet. Therefore, creation of internationalized domains might “open the door” to the online world for a huge number of new users.
According to EURid, as of December 2016 over 480 top-level domains offered the possibility of registering an IDN. 400 of them are new generic top-level domains (gTLDs); over 30 were internationalized new gTLDs. At that time there were 8.7 million registered IDNs, a 28% increase throughout the year. The main source of this growth was the possibility to register second-level IDNs in the Chinese country-code domain .CN.
Nevertheless, the progress is slow. IDNs account for only 3% of all registered domains in the world. In addition, 90% of all IDNs use one of these three alphabets – Latin, Cyrillic or Han (Chinese). This being said, for example, Arabic or Devanagari (India) are barely represented at all in IDNs, even though these languages are among the top-10 most used on the planet (by the total number of people that speak them).
