Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
Internationalised Domain Names may have failed to attract significant numbers of registrations, but they’re now offered by 84% (144) of all ccTLDs, with a further one in preparation to launch, according to the latest IDN World Report. But growth has been limited and awareness is still low.
EURid, the .eu registry, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ICANN to strengthen collaboration between the two organisations supporting Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) and promoting the Universal Acceptance (UA) of all domain names and email addresses.
Over $148,000 has been donated to LGBTQ Community Beneficiaries GLAAD and CenterLink from .gay domain name registration revenue, according to the .gay Impact Report released this week. The registry, Top Level Design, donates 20% of all .gay registration revenue to the LGBTQ organisations.
ICANN is seeking speakers for their next (virtual) for their pre-ICANN72 ccTLD News Sessions on 6 and 7 October. ccTLDs with a best practice, project solution or case study to share with the broader community or even a market development, or perhaps legal or operational news that is engaging, relevant and informative to other ccTLDs from across the world are requested to put their hands up and nominate themselves.
[news release] The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) Team on Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) welcomes anyone to join as a participant or an observer.
INRegistry is offering free .in Internationalised Domain Names in any of the 22 official Indian languages whenever a .in domain name is registered. Registrants will also get a free email address in the local language.
ICANN Tuesday announced the successful completion of String Evaluation of the proposed Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country code top-level domain (ccTLD) string for Israel.
ICANN today [5 Feb] announced the release of the Recommendations for Managing Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Variant Top-Level Domains (TLDs) as a collection of six documents. These recommendations have been developed by the ICANN organization with community feedback received during the Public Comment period.
While the Internet community has often expressed a need for IDN variant TLDs, appropriate technical details and procedures have not been in place to support these. The ICANN Board resolved on 25 September 2010 that “no variants of gTLDs will be delegated … until appropriate variant management solutions are developed.” Subsequent work by the ICANN org and the community on the analysis of issues for Arabic [PDF, 1.06 MB], Chinese [PDF, 2.86 MB], Cyrillic [PDF, 1 MB], Devanagari [PDF, 461 KB], Greek [PDF, 354 KB], and Latin [PDF, 425 KB] scripts in 2011, integrated in the Integrated Issues Report (IIR) [PDF, 2.14 MB] (2012), identified two challenges: (i) there is no accepted definition for variant TLDs, and (ii) there is no ‘variant management’ mechanism for TLDs.
For the first issue, the Root Zone Label Generation Rules (RZ-LGR) Procedure [PDF, 1.39 MB] was developed with the support of the community and adopted by the ICANN Board on 11 April 2013 for implementation. The Procedure has been implemented and RZ-LGR has been developed for six scripts, while other scripts are being added as their proposals are finalized by the relevant script communities. This enables a transparent and predictable mechanism for identification of variant labels going forward.
For the second issue, the ICANN org has undertaken a detailed examination to develop a set of recommendations on variant management mechanisms for TLDs, which have been finalized based on the community input. The recommendations, in summary, include the following:
These recommendations and associated analysis in the six documents will be presented for further consideration to the ICANN Board, anticipated in March 2019.
ICANN‘s mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address â a name or a number â into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2019-02-05-en
The Public Interest Registry (PIR), who operates a number of gTLDs including .org, ngo and .ong and associated internationalised domain names, has begun accepting nominations for their Board of Directors
The Public Interest Registry (PIR), who operates a number of gTLDs including .org, ngo and .ong and associated internationalised domain names, has begun accepting nominations for their Board of Directors.
In 2019 there are three positions opening on the PIR Board. The three directors will serve a 3-year term that begins mid-year 2019 and expires mid-year 2022. PIR says prior board experience is preferred. All directors must be able to read and understand a balance sheet, as well as read and communicate effectively in the English language.
There are approximately 15 full days per year for face-to-face meetings (not including travel time), regular conference calls (generally monthly), and daily email correspondence. Directors that participate in all meetings are eligible to accept compensation up to US$12,000 per year
The deadline for nominations is 15:00 UTC on February 4, 2019. Interested candidates should submit this form. More information is available here.
The estimated number of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) declined by around 14% in 2017, with the biggest decline due to a change in policy by the Vietnamese ccTLD manager, which led to a drop in their second level IDNs from nearly 1 million to just over 5,000. Excluding the impact of Viet Nam, there was a drop of approximately 6% during 2017 with numbers declining to 5.1 million from 5.4m. The decline compares to a growth of 28% from 2015 to 2016 and 9% from 2014 to 2015.
The estimated number of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) declined by around 14% in 2017, with the biggest decline due to a change in policy by the Vietnamese ccTLD manager, which led to a drop in their second level IDNs from nearly 1 million to just over 5,000. Excluding the impact of Viet Nam, there was a drop of approximately 6% during 2017 with numbers declining to 5.1 million from 5.4m. The decline compares to a growth of 28% from 2015 to 2016 and 9% from 2014 to 2015.
The figures come from the latest IDN World Report, most recently updated in early September. The report shows IDNs have consistently comprised approximately 2% of overall domain name registrations. In 2016, thanks to a growth in second level IDNs under the Chinese ccTLD, .cn, the percentage of overall domains was 3%.
The IDN World Report is a collaborative research project led by EURid in collaboration with UNESCO and Verisign that commenced in 2011. It’s supported by the regional ccTLD organisations CENTR, APTLD and LACTLD, and by numerous individual ccTLD registries who share data each year on their IDN experiences.
The decline in .vn IDNs came about due to VNNIC introducing a registration fee for IDN domain names in the Vietnamese country code top level domain. Until January 2017, VNNIC offered free registrations of second level IDNs under .vn and this resulted in nearly 1 million registrations. During 2017, VNNIC brought its IDNs in line with its ASCII domain offerings, with registrations available through its network of registrars for a fee. By the end of 2017, second level IDNs under .vn had dropped to just over 5,000.
In China, CNNIC ceased providing registration statistics for .cn and .中国. In line with industry practice (eg Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief), the IDN World Report has published estimates for these TLDs based on the last reported figures.
When it comes to second versus third level domains, as of December 2017, there were 2.2 million top level IDNs (unchanged since December 2016) and 5.3 million second level IDNs (a reduction of 18% or 1.2 million since December 2016). The report explains that a Top Level (or full) IDN has the same script at both the TLD level and the domain label. Examples are пример.рф and 例如.中国. Second level IDNs, such as 例如.com and dæmi.eu, have a non-ASCII label under an ASCII TLD.
In December 2017 the report shows there were 5.1 million IDNs (or 70% of the total) in ccTLDs and 2.3 million IDNs (30%) in gTLDs. Between December 2016-2017 the number of IDNs in ccTLDs declined 19%, while in gTLDs there was no growth.
The top TLDs, for both top and second level IDNs, as of December 2017 .cn (second level), .com (second level) and .РФ (top level)
The full report, including an analysis of the scripts of web content under .eu and .ею, is available here.