A week of preparations for the 79th ICANN meeting has opened in the capital of Puerto Rico, San Juan (the conference itself will be held from March 2 to 7). One of its first meetings was devoted to issues of Universal Acceptance. The discussion focused mainly on the problems of internationalized domains and email. But lead technology manager for Universal Acceptance, Arnt Gulbrandsen, touched on another aspect of the problem in his speech. We are talking about a serious delay in leading software developers to include support for new generic top-level domains in their programs.
This issue became relevant after it became clear last fall that, for example, the popular instant messenger WhatsApp had not updated its database of gTLDs since November 2015. Accordingly, addresses in domains delegated after this point were not automatically converted by the messenger into hyperlinks, as required by the concept of universal acceptance, and simply common sense. According to Gulbrandsen, quoted by Domain Incite, the corporation works with the largest players in this area, but with varying degrees of success. “If someone’s unresponsive, then we more or less stop talking to them and hope that they grow less important as time passes. This means Twitter. Twitter is completely unresponsive,” Arnt Gulbrandsen said.
Twitter's (now called X) database of generic top-level domains does not appear to have been updated since mid-2020. In any case, addresses in new .SPA, .MUSIC and .KIDS domains delegated after this period are not converted by the service into hyperlinks. As a much more positive example, Gulbrandsen cited interaction with developers in the WordPress ecosystem. Here, the solution to universal adoption issues depends primarily on three key software components - linkify-it, phpautolink and phpmailer. “I’m really happy about the responses from some of these obscure, open-source maintainers,” said Arnt Gulbrandsen. “They really want to do the best for the world, and they are volunteers mostly.” Two of these three components already meet universal acceptance goals, and ICANN is working with the phpmailer developers to achieve the same goal.
