The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ has prepared a report on the results of the annual survey on the support of internationalized domain names and e-mail addresses by ccTLD Registries. The survey was organized by the European Union .EU Domain Registry (EURid) and the Coordination Center. The survey was also a part of a joint study by UNESCO, EURid and the Coordination Center for the Development of Internationalized Domain Names IDN World Report. The study brings together the data on IDN development from a variety of sources, including annual surveys of ccTLD registries around the world.
In 2021, representatives of 95 ccTLD registries from 91 countries took part in the survey: 7 registries from Bolivia, Venezuela, Catalonia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Vatican City, Laos, Mongolia have also joined it. Responses were received for 116 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), of which 29 are IDN top-level domains (IDN ccTLDs) and 87 are Latin-based TLDs.
The report notes that the majority of surveyed ccTLDs (98 ccTLDs or 84%) support second-level IDN registrations for end users. Another 4 ccTLDs are currently preparing to launch the registration of IDN domain names at the second level. At the same time, in half of the cases it offers extended Latin characters (22 ccTLDs or 50%), in second place is the Cyrillic character set (9 ccTLDs or 20%), the third place is for the Han script (8 ccTLDs or 18%), for the registration of such domain names.
The results of the study also show that in registry user interfaces, every second country code top-level domain displays IDNs in both encodings - as U-labels and A-labels, and another 30% - display IDNs in the registry only in U-labels.
Another interesting observation is that the Registries of only ten surveyed ccTLDs, where IDN registration is available, allow the use of email addresses with Unicode characters as the contact email address of a domain name registrar or administrator. These are the ccTLD registries of Belgium (.be), European Union (.eu), Catalonia (.cat), Colombia (.co), UAE (.ae and .امارات), Portugal (.pt), Finland (.fi), France (.fr) and Chile (.cl).
At the same time, corporate mail services of 17 national registries support e-mail addresses with Unicode characters. This is 43% of answered this question, which is almost 2 times higher than in 2020. Among them about 7 registries mail services not only receive or send messages, but also create email addresses with Unicode characters.
Full information on the support level by national registries for IDNs and internationalized email addresses (EAI) can be found in the report published on the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ website.
