Rami Schwartz, Head of the Latin American Telecom registry, which manages the new gTLD .TUBE, blamed ICANN for not paying enough attention to the issue of Universal Acceptance (UA). This term refers to the situation where a domain name or email address, regardless of its type, length and national alphabet characters used, is correctly and consistently understood and processed by all applications, devices and systems. Typically, the context of Universal Acceptance involves internationalized domain names and email addresses, but Rami Schwartz has discovered a new side to this issue.
Initially, he drew attention to the fact that the popular WhatsApp messenger, which automatically converts texts in the form of URLs or domain names into hyperlinks, “has hostility” to the .TUBE. It does not treat names and addresses in this domain zone as hyperlinks. At the same time, the messenger “shows favor” to many other new gTLDs willingly converting their addresses into hyperlinks. Interested in this issue, Schwartz began experimenting with different domains and soon compiled a table from which it clearly followed: WhatsApp recognizes all domains delegated before November 2015 as generic top-level domains. And it does not perceive domains delegated after this period as such. As Domain Incite reports when publishing this news, about 470 generic top-level domains have been delegated since November 2015, which is almost a third of their total to date.
Schwartz published the results of his research on the Public Suffix List website, a Mozilla Foundation project to create a catalog of public domain suffixes used on the Internet. And public discussion of the publication revealed an even deeper problem. As it turns out, the code library of generic top-level domains for the Android operating system was last updated almost 8 years ago – on November 24, 2015. Accordingly, any domain delegated after this date may not be recognized as a domain by Android devices.
Schwartz repeatedly contacted ICANN with requests to pay attention to this situation, but there was no response. However, universal acceptance is one of ICANN's strategic priorities. But, according to Schwartz, the corporation is too focused on the adoption of internationalized domains and does not pay enough attention to the purely technical - as in this case - aspects of the problem.
By the way, it’s worth adding that in the case of WhatsApp, the “misadventures” of the .TUBE are not related to the outdated code library for Android. The messenger also does not recognize the domain on iOS devices. At the same time, if you enter www. or http://, WhatsApp will immediately turn the text into a hyperlink - even if the generic top-level domain specified below does not exist in principle.
