ICANN has published its official report on internationalized domain names, reviewing their development by the end of June 2024. According to it, the DNS root zone contains 1,447 domains, of which 151 are internationalized, comprised of 61 country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) and 90 generic TLDs (gTLDs).
Of the total 4.4 million IDNs registered, 1.467 million, or about 31 percent, are in generic top-level domains. The remaining 69 percent are registered in country-code domains. A 3.36 percent decline in IDN registrations within gTLDs was noted compared to the end of 2022, when such registrations stood at 1.52 million.
Internationalized domains play an essential role in promoting global internet accessibility, particularly for users in regions that use non-Latin scripts. These domains are a cornerstone for achieving Universal Acceptance (UA), one of ICANN’s primary goals, which ensures that all domain names and email addresses – regardless of language, script, or length – are universally recognized and functional across all digital systems and platforms. Currently, the 151 IDNs represented in the report use 23 unique encodings across 37 languages, ranging from Arabic and Armenian to Thai and Urdu.
Meanwhile, Chinese-script domains account for almost a half (49 percent) of all IDNs, followed by Latin-based scripts with diacritics (27 percent), and Korean (9 percent). Cyrillic-script domain comprise approximately 5 percent of internationalized names in gTLDs.
