In its blog, ICANN spoke about the work its information resources and internal corporate systems were carrying out to introduce Universal Acceptance (UA) of all possible internet addresses as soon as possible. Universal Acceptance is the best practice that ensures all internet-enabled applications, devices and systems accept all Latin and non-Latin domain names and email addresses. This is a key task for the development of the internet, because its further growth is only possible today thanks to non-English speakers who use alphabets/scripts different from Latin.
ICANN experts together with the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) have developed an action plan to address this task in ICANN’s internal information systems. It has three stages. First it is necessary to establish support for new short and long (more than 2-3 symbols) ASCII-based TLDs. The second stage is to establish support for Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) TLDs in Unicode or Punycode. Finally, the third stage is to establish support for Email Address Internationalization (EAI).
The article notes that the introduction of the Universal Acceptance requires coordination and involvement of all developers. For example, during the first stage, as of the middle of last year, only 40 percent of the ICANN systems were prepared by the specialists. The remaining 60 percent used solutions from outside developers, so it would have been impossible to achieve UA without them. To date, during the implementation of the second stage, 64 percent of all the services designed by ICANN specialists, are ready for UA, and the other 30 percent do not require the support of internationalized domains, emails and non-Latin scripts. This means therefore that ICANN only needs to prepare six percent of its services for UA and continue working with external service providers. The third stage envisages that this task will be solved by mid-year.
The analysis also includes measures that will help to achieve UA faster, including the establishment of shared code libraries that would save developers’ time and the development of testing environments, which can be used to test the efficiency of the program solutions and fix possible defects. Such code libraries are already available in various programming languages thanks to UASG’s support and coordination.
On April 7, 2019, the anniversary of .RU, the Regional Universal Acceptance Coordination Group for CIS and East Europe was established at the initiative of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ. The group deals with the Universal Acceptance of Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) TLDs and Email Address Internationalization (EAI). Back in December 2019, it received the official status of a Universal Acceptance Steering Group. To date, seven countries are represented in the group (Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Serbia and Ukraine), where 12 IDN TLDs are delegated and used (.РФ, .МОСКВА, .ДЕТИ, .SU, .հայ, .БЕЛ, .УКР, .UA, .გე, .СРБ, .RS, and .LV).
