Universal Acceptance (UA) is one of the most widely discussed topics in the professional community. As over 1,000 top-level domains in non-Latin alphabets have been registered in the past decade, new challenges have emerged that are affecting the network’s performance and require speedy solutions. Therefore, ICANN67 organized a separate track of meetings for the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG).
At the UA Local Initiatives Working Group and Ambassadors Meeting on March 11, participants presented reports on the work that had been recently completed and the UA-related plans of local initiatives and ambassadors from various countries and regions. China, the European Union, India, the United States and Russia shared their progress reports and further plans. Maria Kolesnikova, Chair of the CIS and Eastern Europe Regional Coordination Group on Universal Acceptance, presented the group’s report for the latest period. In December 2019, the Regional Coordination Group was granted the official status of a UASG Local Initiative and is already operating in this role.
In her remarks, Maria Kolesnikova spoke about the initiatives of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ to raise awareness among Russian software developers and email server administrators about UA implementation. “The main focus of our local initiative is on sharing technical and non-technical knowledge with local communities in each of the countries represented in the group. To help them get informed on the topic, we provide basic information about Universal Acceptance and emphasize that Universal Acceptance is not only about IDNs and EAI, but also about new gTLDs,” Maria Kolesnikova said.
She added that the technical community puts special emphasis on the internet standards for IDN and EAI support as well as the availability of libraries for certain programming languages and the implementation of EAI support in various email software. There are now technical capabilities and solutions for supporting multilingual domains and email addresses on which experts continue to work.
According to Coordination Center Director Andrey Vorobyev, who commented on the results of the meeting: “For Russia and the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, the work toward implementing Universal Acceptance is extremely important. Russia’s Cyrillic domain .РФ, which is marking its 10th anniversary this year, is the second largest non-Latin domain name in the world. Of course, making Cyrillic email available as soon as possible and other aspects of Universal Acceptance for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) are necessary for the domain’s further development. But unfortunately, this process is taking time, despite the proactive efforts on behalf of the UASG and the fact that the technical issues with implementation have been largely resolved.”
“Discussions with developers have shown that there are still problems to solve for the implementation to actually happen, and these problems are not related to libraries and RFC,” he added.
The UASG was established as a group in charge of Universal Acceptance in January 2015 at the initiative of the internet community. It is now operating with ICANN’s support. This global aggregator of UA knowledge and resources involves recognized international experts in UA. Five working groups were created within the UASG last year, to focus on different aspects of Universal Acceptance of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), new gTLDs and emails based on non-Latin alphabets. The UA Local Initiatives Working Group is one of such groups.
Members of the CIS and Eastern Europe Regional Coordination Group on Universal Acceptance developed a plan for promoting UA in their countries. Currently, the group consists of experts from seven countries (Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia and Latvia) with 12 delegated IDNs (.РФ, .МОСКВА, .ДЕТИ, .SU, .հայ, .БЕЛ, .УКР, .UA, .გე, .СРБ, .RS and .LV).
