At-Large Policy: ICANN’s Goal for a Multilingual Internet through IDNs
Description:
For more than 2 decades, ICANN together with the technical community and volunteers around the world, have been at the forefront of efforts to support an inclusive and multilingual Internet by internationalizing the Domain Name System (DNS). Such efforts, since 2003, have enabled end users to navigate the Internet by using the DNS in selected local scripts (written languages) which was not possible before.
To-date, 61 IDN country code top-level domains (ccTLD) and 92 IDN generic top-level domains (gTLDs) have been delegated in the root zone. Together, these represent 37 languages in 23 scripts. According to the IDN World Report, the total number of IDN registrations under ccTLDs and gTLDs (both at the top and second levels) stood at 8.6 mil in 2021, yet this remains but a fraction of the total 341.7 million domain name registrations across all TLDs at the end of 2021 as reported by Verisign.
In this session, several ICANN community leaders will discuss the direction to be taken by ICANN in attempting to improve the uptake of IDNs, while remaining cognizant of technical and operational challenges, the need to adhere to relevant international standards and protocols (such as the IDNA2008 standard), community-developed rules to determine the validity of IDN from a language/script perspective (i.e the Root Zone - Label Generation Rules), as well as individual end user perceptions on the availability and usability of IDNs.
