ICANN summed up the results of the first ever Global Universal Acceptance Day on its official website. The term "Universal Acceptance" (UA) refers to a situation where a domain name or email address using any existing languages and encodings is adequately perceived and processed by all applications, devices and systems. Achieving Universal Acceptance is essential to the development of the global network and one of ICANN's strategic goals.
In preparation for Universal Acceptance Day, the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) and ICANN received 90 different proposals, 54 of which were approved and shortlisted. The total number of events held within the framework of the Global Day of Universal Acceptance was 56. They were held in more than 40 countries around the world. A significant part of the events took place on March 28 - the date approved as the Day of Universal Acceptance. Also, many events took place on May 17 - on the birthday of the Internet.
Half of the past events were educational and were devoted to popularizing the very idea of Universal Acceptance. The second half was more applied in nature and included elements of technical training to address specific issues related to Universal Acceptance. Geographically, the leaders were the countries of the Asia-Pacific region and Africa, which accounted for 37% and 36% of all events, respectively. For comparison: Europe accounted for only 3% of events. This, however, is quite understandable: almost all European countries use the Latin encoding, and the issue of Universal Acceptance for them is either not at all, or is far from being as acute as, say, for India or Thailand.
Nevertheless, there are many countries in Europe for which the problem of Universal Acceptance is very relevant. This is, for example, Armenia, where, as previously reported, on March 28, a regional conference “Universal Acceptance Day” was held as part of the Global Day of Universal Acceptance. Director of the Coordination Center for .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev and a number of leading specialists of the Center took part in it.
In total, about 10,000 people participated in the events of the first Global Day of Universal Acceptance. These are representatives of state institutions and authorities, telecommunications companies, domain industry, business, science and education, as well as public and non-profit organizations.
