On May 6, CENTR held its 35th meeting on marketing and administrative issues. Representatives of 23 European ccTLDs and the US and Japanese national registries attended the online meeting. Experts discussed the development of IDNs: the current situation, the specifics of their promotion and arising difficulties. Taking part in the discussion were Patrick Miles (CENTR), Giovanni Seppia (.EU), Dana Ludviga (.LV), Jaromir Talir (.CZ), Anna Karakhanyan (.AM), and Sumika Uchikawa (.JP), among other experts.
Giovanni Seppia presented the joint UNESCO and EURid research project on internationalized domain names, IDN World Report, which the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ joined in 2020. The project brings together data on IDN development from various sources, including annual surveys of ccTLD registries from around the world.
At the Coordination Center’s initiative, the 2020 survey included questions related to Universal Acceptance, such as details on implementing support for IDNs and EAIs in the registration systems of ccTLD registries.
Giovanni Seppia said that in 2020 representatives of 91 ccTLD registries from 88 countries and one group of countries, the European Union, took part in the survey. Responses were received for 112 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), of which 29 are IDN top-level domains (IDN ccTLDs) and 83 are top-level domains in the Latin script. The speaker noted that the majority of the 112 ccTLDs that responded to the survey supported the registration of internationalized domain names at the second or third level: 91 ccTLDs, which is 81 percent of the total number of respondents. Five ccTLDs are currently preparing to launch IDN registrations, and 16 ccTLDs (14 percent of all survey respondents) do not support the registration of such names.
Maria Kolesnikova, chief analyst at the Coordination Center, shared the story of the .РФ ccTLD’s success: starting conditions and state support for the domain’s launch, PR and advertising campaigns carried out by the registry, and the opportunities that the Cyrillic domain gave Russian users. She also talked about events and projects held to mark the 10th anniversary of the .РФ domain, in particular, about the Поддерживаю.рф project aimed at supporting the development of infrastructure for Cyrillic domains and email addresses.
In conclusion of the meeting, Maria Kolesnikova noted how important Universal Acceptance was for the development of IDNs and EAI, presented the areas of work of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), and asked the meeting participants which webinars on UA and IDN development they were interested in for continuing their work.
“Today we and our colleagues from other ccTLD registries discussed various aspects of the full support of IDNs and EAIs, and once again concluded that the fact that a lot of software products, websites and services do not comply with the UA principles is the main restriction on their development. However, European ccTLD registries intend to continue their work to promote and develop domains and email addresses in national languages,” Maria Kolesnikova added.
