The 2019 IDN World Report shows 20% IDN Growth
The 2019 IDN World Report findings have been published to idnworldreport.eu and will be presented today at the IGF Annual meeting in Berlin.
The Report on Internationalised Domain Names continues a long-standing research collaboration between EURid and UNESCO, with the support of Verisign and the regional ccTLD organisations.
The major findings from this year`s report are:
- As of December 2018, 9 million IDNs were registered around the world, an increase of 20 % since 2017.
- IDNs comprise 2.5% of the world’s domains, a percentage that has grown 0.5% during last year. The data in this report include IDNs across both ccTLDs and gTLDs, both at the first and second level.
- Distribution patterns of IDN registrations are different from those of traditional, ASCII domain names. IDN registrations are highest in Asia and Pacific region, with China covering 3.9 million of the registered IDNs.
Despite the recent growth, the major challenge to mass uptake of IDNs continues to be their poor usability:
- in email,
- online user identifiers,
- and even in browsers, applications and devices including Internet of Things.
“There has been progress in supporting IDNs in mobile browsers and in email, but more work is needed to connect up these gains, to offer IDN users the same experience as their counterparts who use traditional domain names”, comments Emily Taylor, lead author of the IDN World Report.
EURid continues to support the linguistic diversity online by adding another IDN extension to its portfolio. The .ευ (Greek script) was launched on 14 November 2019, while the .ею (Cyrillic script) has been available since June 2016.
The 2019 report also includes a study highlighting the online experience of European indigenous language speakers, to mark the UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages.
View the 2019 IDN World Report at idnworldreport.eu.
