The ICANN IDN and UA Steering Committee, recently formed by ICANN to coordinate interdepartmental interactions within the organization, has published its first progress report on the development of IDN support.
Ensuring the secure and stable implementation and use of IDN consisting of non-Latin characters (such as Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Thai, etc.) is critical to the development of a multilingual Internet and the growth of digital inclusion. Implementation of support for IDNs is one of the objectives of ICANN Strategic Plan for 2021-2025. The promotion of Universal Acceptance, including IDNs is one of the ICANN President Goran Marby's goals for 2022 presented by the ICANN Board.
The report provides detailed content and current status across four main sections of ICANN activity. It includes (1) Developing an IDN Technical Knowledge Base, (2) Supporting IDN Policy Development and Implementation, (3) IDN Implementation and Operations at ICANN org, and (4) Communication and Outreach.
According to the report, 153 IDN top-level domains (IDN TLDs) were delegated, while 8.3 million IDN second-level domain names were registered in the world, of which 1.6 million are in gTLD, as of December 2021. Thanks to the efforts of the ICANN Community, recommendations for IDN top-level domains for determining acceptable characters for registration (Root Zone Label Generation Rules Version 4) have been developed and published for 18 scripts. Cyrillic and Armenian alphabet proposals prepared for inclusion in the next version of the RZ-LGR document. In addition, 46 character sets have been prepared for various scripts and national languages that registries can use to check the list of valid characters when registering second-level domains (Second-Level Reference Label Generation Rules). The corresponding character set was finalized in May 2021 for the Russian language. Determining the correctness of IDN domains and valid options is necessary to ensure the stable and secure functioning of the DNS root zone.
Full version is available here.
