ICANN started to accept applications for IDNccTLDs in November 2009, and installed the first set into the Domain Names System in May 2010. The first set was a group of Arabic names for the countries of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. By May 2010, 21 countries had submitted applications to ICANN, representing 11 scripts. An internationalized country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD) is a top-leveldomain with a specially encoded domain name that is displayed in an end user application, such as a web browser, in its language-native script or alphabet,such as the Arabic alphabet, or a non-alphabetic writing system, such as Chinese characters. IDN ccTLDs are an application of the internationalized domain name(IDN) system to top-level Internet domains assigned to countries, or independent geographic regions.

In December 2009 there were 192 million domain names

Several organizations post market-share-ranked lists of domain name registrars and numbers of domains registered at each. The published lists differ in which top-level domains (TLDs) they use; in the frequency of updates; and in whether their basic data is absolute numbers provided by registries, or daily changes derived from Zone files. The lists appear to all use at most 16 publicly available generic TLDs (gTLDs) that existed as of December 2009, plus.us. A February 2010 ICANN zone file access concept paper explains that most country code TLD (ccTLD) registries stopped providing zone files in 2003,citing abuse.