If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you know I’m a fan of internationalized domain names (IDNs).
Over the past year or so, ICANN has approved more than 20 IDNs across a range of countries, scripts and languages. I’ve posted a running list here.
Today I’m happy to announce a new map that displays all current IDNs along with their ccTLD counterparts.
The map will be printed on demand. If you’re interested in a copy, you can order here.
I am bullish on internationalized domain names (IDNs). I view them as a natural evolution of a multilingual Internet.
But I also am well aware that there are those who says IDNs are more hype than substance. That they will never be more than a novelty.
With this in mind, I have to report that the number of IDN registrations in Japan has decreased over the past year.
Japan’s registry has launched a web site to counter this trend, shown below:
What do you think? Will this ominous-looking web site stem the tide?
I’m not so sure.
But I don’t believe the problem is IDNs per se, rather the lack of full-length IDN availability (coming soon to Japan and elsewhere).
More important is the lack for IDN support across all software applications.
Also, keep in mind that while IDNs struggle to take off in Japan, in Russia they are big news. As of today, more than 700,000 Russian IDNs have been registered.
When I first discovered the popular iPhone photo app Instagr.am, my first thought was: Look, another creative use of a country code!
In this case, the country code in question is that of Armenia.
What I found interesting about the company is that it doesn’t refer to itself as “Instragr.am” but instead simply as “Instagram” even though it doesn’t own the Instagram.com domain. Perhaps now that it has 1 million users, it can raise enough money to purchase the domain. Or, perhaps the lesson here is that it doesn’t need to own a .com domain.
That’s where search engines come in awfully handy — particularly the iTunes search engine.
Here is my running list of creative country codes. And our world-famous Country Codes of the World poster.
This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions.
Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range of Arabic domains. I left off the Latin country code equivalents (in, cn, th, sa, etc.) to illustrate what the Internet is going to look like (at a very high level) in the years ahead.
This next revolution is a linguistically local revolution. In terms of local content, it is already happening. Right now, more than half of the content on the Internet is not in English. Ten years from now, the percentage of English content could easily drop below 25%.
But there are a few technical obstacles that have so far made the Internet not as user friendly as it should be for people in the regions highlighted above. They’ve been forced to enter Latin-based URLs to get to where they want to go. Their email addresses are also Latin-based. This will all change over the next two decades.
For those of us who are fluent only in Latin-based languages, this next wave of growth is going to be interesting, if not a bit challenging. In a Latin-based URL environment, you can still easily navigate to and around non-Latin web sites and brands. For example, if I want to find Baidu in China, I can enter www.baidu.cn. For Yandex in Russia, it’s yandex.ru.
But flash forward a few years and these Latin URLs (though they’ll still exist) may no longer function as the front doors into these markets.
Try Яндекс.рф. It currently redirects to Yandex.ru.
In a few years, I doubt this redirection will exist.
We’re getting close to a linguistically local Internet — from URL to email address. There are still significant technical obstacles to overcome. It will be exciting to see which companies take the lead in overcoming them — as these companies will be well positioned to be leaders in these emerging markets.
UPDATE: I’ve expanded on this topic in a recent article on IP Watch.
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