On March 11, Maria Kolesnikova, chief analyst at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ took part in ICANN70 Prep Week, an event with themed meetings, discussions and conferences preceding the ICANN70 conference which will take place online on March 22-25.
At an online meeting of representatives of national TLDs, ccTLDs News Session, Kolesnikova spoke about the results of a poll on the support of internationalized domain names and email addresses by national registries, IDN Survey 2020, with 112 national top-level domains taking part in it. Kolesnikova said that among the IDN ccTLDs that took part, most used Arabic script (9 ccTLDs). They are followed by the Cyrillic script (7 ccTLDs) and Han script (4 IDN ccTLDs). Eighty-one percent of respondents support the registration of internationalized domain names. Almost a third (29 ccTLDs) of them are national top-level IDN domains.
Maria Kolesnikova suggested the participants at the meeting discuss their readiness to universal acceptance, and conducted a small poll. Eighty percent of those attending the meeting expressed interest in the further expansion of the universal acceptance program, while 90 percent welcomed the idea that all systems and services of national registries should be UA ready, that is, to completely support work with all existing domain names and email addresses, including those with national alphabet characters.
During a meeting of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), Maria Kolesnikova delivered a review on the latest achievements in promoting universal acceptance, including the areas and results of the local initiative of universal acceptance in CIS and Eastern Europe in 2020 and plans for 2021.
“This year, we plan to continue working with the engineering community. Plans call for holding a series of educational events, the launch of a certification program and work to increase awareness of the need to introduce universal acceptance. Another important field of work is with the end users: we need to tell them about the opportunities of using IDN domains and email addresses in their native languages, and also about the work underway in this relation,” Maria Kolesnikova added.
Universal acceptance will also be discussed at the ICANN70 Virtual Community Forum on March 25. You are welcome to join. Registration is required to ICANN70.
