Ensuring multilingualism on the Internet has become one of the key priorities of ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – which is responsible for managing domain name and IP address registrations.
As a versatile and inexhaustible educational resource, as well as a platform for accessing a wide range of services, Internet must be both multilingual and accessible to all.
This is precisely the goal of the global initiative known as “Universal Acceptance” (UA), launched by ICANN. The movement has now brought together stakeholders from around 200 countries.
As a result, 85% of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and 41% of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) currently support the use of non-Latin script domains, known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
Such domain names – for example, the Armenian-script .հայ – are now available in various languages and scripts around the world, including .中国 (China), .рф (Russian Federation), .امارات (UAE), .срб (Serbia), and others.
ICANN’s Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), which leads the promotion of Universal Acceptance, recently announced that a new package of top-level domain (TLD) updates will be made available to countries starting July 1.
