The development of Internationalized Domain Names and achieving Universal Acceptance are strategic priorities for the ICANN. For the second year in a row, ICANN publishes the IDN Progress Report. According to the latest release, as of the end of 2022, there were 1.52 million registered names across all IDNs. In this context, the word “progress” in the title of the report does not look very appropriate: the number of registrations for the year decreased by 2.94%. However, the good news is that the rate of decline is still slowing down: between 2019 and 2021, the number of registrations decreased by 11.36%, the Domain Incite reminds, reporting this news.
The leaders are Chinese-coded names, which account for half of all registrations. Then comes the Latin encoding: this is also quite common in internationalized domains for languages that use diacritics (superscripts and subscripts). Such domain names make up 26% of the total number of internationalized ones. This is followed by Korean, Cyrillic and Japanese encodings. It is interesting to note that Indian internationalized domains (and there are many of them) are inferior in total registrations to Hebrew domain names, despite the huge population gap between India and Israel.
It is also important to emphasize that the report does not include the results of internationalized ccTLDs. Taking them into account, the overall picture would be completely different. Thus, in the Russian ccTLD .РФ there are about 681,000 names, and in the Chinese national domain .中国 - more than 190,000.
