EURid’s World Report on IDNs: Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Website (.中文网) Lead New gTLDs

The European Registries for Internet Domains (EURid), published their comprehensive World Report on Internationalized Domain Names 2014. The New gTLD chapter features TLD Registry‘s 2 IDN New gTLDs, Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网), as the most successful IDN new gTLDs so far.

The August 2014 volume of the report is supported by the United Nations’ UNESCO, Verisign, the Council for European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR), the Latin American and Caribbean Association of cCTLDs  (LACTLD), the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Name Association (APTLD), and the African Top Level Domain (AfTLD).

“At the time of writing (May 2014), 252 new gTLDs have launched of which 23 are IDN
new gTLDs (9%). The total number of new gTLD domain name registrations is
715 000, of which 54 000 (8%) are in IDN new gTLDs. While the percentage of IDNs in the new gTLD space is low (8%), it is higher than the percentage of IDNs in all domain name registrations (2%).”

“94% of new gTLD applications are in Latin script. Of all other scripts, only Han (Chinese and Japanese) has over 1%. Only 3 new gTLD applications – for transliterations of .com, .net and .org – are in Devanagari, the writing system for the world’s fourth most popular language (Hindi, 260 million speakers). The scripts necessary for writing Bengali, Javanese, Lahnda, Telugu, which are among the world’s most popular 20 languages are not represented in the new gTLD applications at all.”

TLD Registry’s CMO Simon Cousins stated, “We’re proud to see our Chinese IDNs under Dot Chinese Online (.​在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) highlighted as a case study in the EurID-UNESCO report. The TLD Registry team is proud of the work we do to improve the lives of vast numbers of ordinary Chinese internet users”.

There is a case study on 中文网 (.Chinese) and 在线 (.Online) on page 86 of the report.

“I believe that internationalised domain names are an essential entry point for a multilingual and inclusive Internet, and that is why we have made them an integral part of our policies to protect an Internet that is open and accessible to all”, said Neelie Kroes, the Vice President of the European Commission.