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Supporting a Multilingual Internet: ICANN Publishes 2022 IDN Annual Report

16 February 2023

Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) published the 2022 Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Annual Report. The report provides an overview of the status of IDNs at the top and second levels of the Domain Name System (DNS), as well as the IDN-related work being done by the ICANN organization (ICANN org) and community. The full report is available here.

ICANN org publishes the IDN Annual Report to help track the status of IDNs and highlight ongoing IDN work. The 2022 edition of the report covers four main areas: delegation and registration statistics, IDN policy being developed by the ICANN community, IDN-related projects at ICANN org, and IDN implementation and operations at ICANN org.

IDNs enable people around the world to use domain names in local languages and scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, and more. IDNs not only help build a more multilingual Internet, but allow organizations, governments, and businesses the ability to reach more citizens and consumers in their preferred language or script.

A total of 26 unique scripts are currently supported in the root zone: Arabic, Armenian, Bangla, Chinese (Han), Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji [Han]), Kannada, Khmer, Korean (Hangul and Hanja [Han]), Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Myanmar, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai. These scripts are used to write hundreds of languages around the world. Domain names in these scripts will be supported in the next round of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).

The secure and stable use of IDNs is crucial for digital inclusivity and is a priority for ICANN org. As stated in ICANN's mission, the org works "to adopt or implement policies or procedures that take into account the use of domain names as natural-language identifiers." In an effort to fulfill this mission, IDNs and Universal Acceptance (UA) are included in ICANN's Strategic Plan for FY21-25

For more information on IDNs and ICANN org's IDN Program, visit the IDN homepage.

About ICANN

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 – a name or a number – 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 nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.
 

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