Representatives of some of the largest technological companies and domain institutions, including Donuts, Google, Microsoft, Go Daddy and Afilias, became part of a newly organized Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), creating with support from ICANN and Domain Name Association (DNA). It aims at addressing many problems facing gTLD and internationalized domains registrants today.
The main among these problems is that many of such domains are simply not supported by a significant number of software and services and trying to use them leads to the malfunction of devices. Representative of Google Brent London said during an ICANN meeting in Singapore: “You try to use an internationalized domain or a long new gTLD, or even a short new gTLD, or certainly an internationalized email address and you’re likely to run into problems. What we’re doing is going around asking developers to make their products work,” he said.
The problem really exists, moreover, it’s not new. 15 years after the launch of .INFO domain some webpages do not recognize email addresses, because they are programmed that the TLD in no longer than three characters in length. With the launch of a great number of new and internationalized domains the situation is particularly acute. Experts, for instance, demonstrate that internationalized email addresses are often simply useless, because they are not supported by the majority of software and services.
In every specific case the problem can be solved pretty fast from the technical point of view. We are talking about bringing attention to the problem and coordination of the developers’ and manufacturers’ efforts. However, according to the UASG representatives this is what poses the main difficulty. They believe that the final decision of the universal acceptance of new and internationalized domains can take no less than 10 years. DNA association in the line with this has already started creating a data bank for the developers. It will consist of faults descriptions that occur when using new and internationalized domains and examples of codes to fix them.
