[news release] At a time when digital content creators have become a major source of information for people, a UNESCO survey published today reveals that 62% do not carry out rigorous and systematic fact-checking of information prior to sharing it. But 73% express the wish to be trained to do so. UNESCO is launching this month the very first global course to address this, with more than 9,000 participants from 160 countries already registered to participate.
More than 85% of people are worried about the impact of online disinformation and 87% believe it has already harmed their country’s politics, according to a global survey, as the United Nations announced a plan to tackle the phenomenon.
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.
Following the initial signing of an MOU between EURid and UNESCO in February of 2013, both parties have agreed to continue to successful collaboration with its renewal.
Both parties will continue to carry out common projects to contribute to the promotion of multilingualism in cyberspace with special focus on research and analysis of the International Domain Names (IDN) deployment, preparation of joint World Report(s) on the IDN deployment, cooperation in preparation of joint events, meetings and projects involving experts from various professional and academic communities, industry as well as other international, regional and national organizations.
Since 2016 the IDN World Report is available online at idnworldreport.eu.
This EURid announcement was sourced from:
https://eurid.eu/en/news/renewal-of-mou-with-unesco/
Despite important advances, more work is needed by all parties if Internationalised Domain Names are to foster the growth of multilingualism online, according to the 2013 EURid-UNESCO World Report on Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs). This year the report features the cooperation of Verisign for the analysis of IDN data in the .com, .net and .eu registers.The report will be presented at the Internet Governance Forum 2013 (IGF), in Bali, Indonesia, today (24 October).According to the report only two percent of the world’s registered domain names are IDNs, or domain names that include characters from non-Latin scripts, such as Cyrillic or Arabic. This slow uptake is in stark contrast to the burgeoning multilingual content online.Most if not all IDN implementations underperform because of poor user awareness and experience, which lead to poor uptake. In addition, the report finds there is poor support for IDNs in mobile devices that are extremely popular in many developing countries for accessing the internet.However, where IDNs are used, there is a 99 percent correlation between the language or script of the domain name and the language of associated website content, a clear indication that IDNs have a vital part to play in fostering a multilingual internet.”Languages are who we are,” states Janis Karklins, UNESCO Assistant Director-General in the report’s foreword. “By protecting them, we protect ourselves; by promoting them, we sustain cultural diversity. This must be true also for cyberspace. To have maximum impact, to be sustainable and to be beneficial to all, cyberspace must be inclusive. Every woman and every man should be able to speak and write in their mother tongue, and this is why IDNs are so important.”This report builds on the 2012 World Report on IDN Deployment, and the 2011 study “IDNs State of Play”, which found that there was a significant correlation between IDNs and local language. The 2012 World Report concluded that Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) are an essential building block towards creating a truly multilingual internet.The future of IDNsThe launch of new IDN generic top-level domains (gTLDs) in late 2013, early 2014, and particularly the large number of top-level domains using Chinese characters, is expected to boost the market, providing an incentive for stakeholders to update internet infrastructure and improve user experience on popular Web applications in order to access potentially valuable markets. The new gTLDs may also help to raise end-users’ awareness that domain names can be in languages other than EnglishThe statistics presented in the 2013 EURid-UNESCO World Report on IDNs are based on a data set of 228 million domain names, and include detailed information about more than one million IDNs from the .com, .net and .eu registers. The report also includes case studies of the IDN country code top-level domain registry experiences from the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, Viet Nam, Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the Russian Federation.Download the full 104 page report at link.eurid.eu/insights.