India: One Country, Many Internationalized Domain Names

Home / Blogs

India: One Country, Many Internationalized Domain Names

By John Yunker

Jun 06, 2011 11:11 AM PDT
Comments: 2
Views: 9,631

If you're interested in learning more about Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), UNESCO and EURid recently released a report on the evolution and challenges of IDNs.

It's a good read and it highlights some of the struggles that countries and registries face and taking IDNs mainstream. Though Russia has so far proven to be a major success story — with more than 800,000 IDN registrations so far (and counting) — most other IDNs are have a long ways to go yet. Arabic IDNs in particular face an uphill battle because web browsers offer poor (and inconsistent) support for them.

I noticed in the report that India's IDNs were not all properly displayed. So here's a screen shot from our IDN poster that illustrates the wealth of scripts used within India, as illustrated by the country's seven (yes, seven) approved IDNs:

As of today, 26 countries have received one or more IDNs; I've collected the full list here.

By John Yunker, Author and founder of Byte Level Research

Follow CircleID on

Related topics: DNS, Domain Names, ICANN, Multilinguism, New TLDs

SHARE THIS POST

If you are pressed for time ...

... this is for you. More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.

I make a point of reading CircleID. There is no getting around the utility of knowing what thoughtful people are thinking and saying about our industry.

Vinton Cerf, Co-designer of the TCP/IP Protocols & the Architecture of the Internet