ICANN - Growing interest in Universal Acceptance

Interest in Universal Acceptance (UA) has increased significantly over the past year. This was reported by the network administration ICANN and the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) in their report on the second ‘UA Day’, which was published on 14 August 2024.

ICANN established the UASG in 2015 under the motto ‘every domain name should be treated equally’. It should ensure that every top-level domain is accepted by all internet clients such as web browsers, email programmes and routers. Established two- and three-character TLDs such as .de or .com are considered unproblematic in this respect; however, the introduction of hundreds of nTLDs with four or more characters and internationalised domain names with a wide variety of character sets has made this task much more complex. UA is therefore regarded as a basic technical prerequisite for the further expansion of the Internet because it ensures that domain names can be used equally by all Internet-enabled applications, devices and systems, regardless of script, language or character length. For ICANN, in turn, UA is fundamental to ensuring that everyone worldwide can experience the social and economic power of the internet with the domain they choose that best suits their interests, business, culture, language and script. ‘UA Day’, introduced in 2023, is intended to help with this; it is not set on a specific day, but focuses on various types of events around 28 March to raise awareness of UA.

ICANN seems to be succeeding, albeit slowly. In the ‘Universal Acceptance (UA) Day 2024 Report’, the internet administration reports that a total of 6,544 people took part in 52 events in 47 countries between March and May 2024. This year, a total of 133 proposals to increase UA were submitted from 68 countries. By comparison, 90 proposals were received from 56 countries in 2023, which ICANN believes shows a growing interest in this topic. Interest in UA was particularly strong in Africa, where 33 per cent of events were held, followed by the Asia-Pacific region (29 per cent) and Latin America/Caribbean (25 per cent). The low level of interest in North America and Europe is due to the widespread use of the Latin alphabet. The languages represented include Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Bangla, Bemba, Burmese, Chinese, English, French, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Korean, Laotian, Macedonian, Nyanja, Portuguese, Serbian, Sesotho, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil and Thai. The central event took place on 28 March 2024 in Belgrade, hosted by the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS). In addition to various speeches and presentations (including Sally Costerton, ICANN Interim President and CEO), the full-day programme included the integration of UA into technical curricula at universities and a technical workshop on the practical implementation of universal acceptance.

While progress remains small, it is promising. iMasters in Brazil, for example, showed how to set up a completely self-hosted mail server with Portuguese usernames and domains. They shared the video with 100,000 Brazilian software developers, who have viewed it 1,700 times to date. The Internet Society in Trinidad and Tobago partnered with the University of West Indies to UA-enable their website. The organisers demonstrated that someone with an Arabic address can apply to study at their university. If you want to know more, you should read the 14-page report, which provides lots of statistical information about ‘UA Day’ and cross-references to presentations. Every line of code can help to open up the Internet further and make it even more global.

You can find the ‘Universal Acceptance (UA) Day 2024 Report’ at:
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/f ... n24-en.pdf