Until 2001, the incumbent Post and Telephone service for Viet Nam managed the ccTLD. From 2001, VNNIC, the Viet Nam Network Information Center took over management of .vn. VNNIC is affiliated with the Viet Nam Ministry of Information and Communications. As at October 2013, .vn had more than 260,000 registered names of which 66% had active websites. It is estimated that there were 214,000 total domain name registrations (across all top level domains) by Vietnamese organizations suggesting that .vn has approximately 45% national market share. By December 2013, the number of “.vn” registrations had reached 266 028. The .vn domain is the largest in the ASEAN region and one of the largest ccTLDs in Asia region, behind Japan, and Republic of Korea.
The Vietnamese language is written in Latin script with diacritics, so, the .vn domain itself is meaningful for Vietnamese speakers.
The Vietnamese registry, VNNIC, conducted a trial of an IDN for .vn from 2004 to 2006. After the results of that trial were analysed, an official launch of the .vn IDN took place in March 2007. The official launch was limited to existing holders of ASCII .vn registrations.
In April of 2011, free and unlimited registration in the .vn IDN began. On the first day of the land rush 14,000 .vn IDNs were registered. During the first week there were 113,129 registrations under this policy. In the first four months there were 360,357 registrations. By October of 2013, the number of Vietnamese IDN registrations had reached 936,729, making .vn the largest IDN ccTLD registry in the world. It is estimated that IDN .vn domain names will reach 1 million registrations in June, 2014.
About 13% of registered IDNs combine with active services which are provided by VNNIC and its partner). While this is a low percentage, it is an increase of 5% on the previous year (9% in 2012). Analysis of active .vn IDNs indicates that 57% redirect to an existing web site (compared with 74% in 2012). A further 30% landed on a web hosting template.
VNNIC reports that in October 2013, four IDN .vn domain names received over 1 million queries, the most popular being “hùngloaviệtnam.vn” with 4.5 million queries.