Experts from the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ took part in an August 5 webinar following the ICANN 68 Virtual Policy Forum. At the webinar for the Russian-speaking audience, participants in the ICANN 68 session gave their first-hand view on the main results of the conference and ICANN plans.
Maria Kolesnikova, Chief Analyst of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and Chair of the UA Local Initiative in the CIS and Eastern Europe, said that Universal Acceptance (UA) was discussed at three sessions of the conference. She noted that easier access to multilingual content is one of the key aspects of UA. Although the issues of online content are beyond ICANN’s scope of responsibility, it is content that internet users are particularly interested in and UA is linked with the infrastructure’s readiness to provide access to it. Maria Kolesnikova recalled that the UA Local Initiative in the CIS and Eastern Europe conducted a number of workshops. For example, in 2019, UA training sessions were held in Armenia. In May 2020, a training session on improving the support of IDNs and EAI was conducted on the RIF Online platform with the support of the Coordination Center.
“Today, we spoke about the level of interest in UA on behalf of representatives of all five ICANN regions and the discussions held at different platforms of ICANN 68 on this issue – inside the community of internet service providers, the At-Large Community of end users and the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). Participation of all sides is important for introducing the existing technical standards in support of internationalized domain names and email addresses,” Maria Kolesnikova emphasized, summing up the results of the webinar.
Speakers at the webinar talked about the further plans of ICANN and other organizations to conduct international events. Natalya Filina (EURALO) reported that the next meeting, ICANN 69, will be held over three weeks, which will help ease the participants’ schedules.
In conclusion of the webinar, its moderator, Mikhail Anisimov (ICANN), announced the holding of the virtual Eastern European #DNS Forum in mid-November, and invited all participants to attend TLDCON 2020, which will also be held online on September 7-8.
