In 2020, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ became a partner of UNESCO and EURid’s joint survey on internationalized domain names, IDN World Report (https://idnworldreport.eu/). The survey gathers data on IDN development from various sources, including annual surveys of ccTLD registries from around the world.
Thanks to the involvement of the Coordination Center, in 2020 the annual IDN survey was significantly expanded to include questions on Universal Acceptance, in particular the details of how internationalized domain names and email addresses are supported in country code top-level domain registration systems. The Coordination Center added questions on the available formats for entering and displaying IDNs in registration systems and WHOIS services. The annual survey also collects information about national registries’ level of support for internationalized email addresses (EAI), including whether EAI addresses are available for registrars and registrants, and how their support is implemented by registries’ mail servers.
In 2020, representatives of 91 ccTLD registries from 88 countries and the European Union took part in the survey. Responses were received for 112 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), including 29 IDN ccTLDs and 83 top-level domains in Latin script. Almost half of the survey participants (41 registries or 45 percent) are from Europe, with 28 registries or 31 percent from the Asia-Pacific region, 17 registries or 19 percent from Latin America and the Caribbean, and two registries each from Africa and North America. Most domains among the IDN ccTLDs that took part in the survey used Arabic script (9 ccTLDs), followed by Cyrillic ones (7 ccTLDs). Third place went to the Han script with 4 IDN ccTLDs.
The report notes that most of the 112 ccTLDs in the survey supported registration of internationalized domain names at the second or third level: 91 ccTLDs, or 81 percent of the total number of respondents. Five ccTLDs are currently preparing to launch IDN registrations, and 16 ccTLDs (14 percent of respondents) do not support registration of such names. Almost a third (29 ccTLDs) of those who answered ‘yes’ are IDN ccTLDs.
Another interesting observation was made about the IDN format in registries and user interfaces. Almost half of the ccTLDs (29 domains or 47 percent) of the 62 ccTLDs that answered this question have IDNs in both Unicode and Punycode, while 19 registries (31 percent of all respondents) only use Punycode format for IDNs, and 14 registries (23 percent) only use Unicode format.
Read more about the use and development of IDNs in the report published at the Coordination Center’s website.
