The 70th ICANN conference concluded on March 25. The online event had 71 sections and over 1,500 participants, including experts from the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
Maria Kolesnikova, chief analyst at the Coordination Center and chair of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), delivered a report and moderated one of ICANN70’s final sessions, Remediating Universal Acceptance Issues.
The session participants discussed existing noncompliance issues with the principles of Universal Acceptance of domain names and email addresses as well as the UASG strategy to eliminate them. Maria Kolesnikova spoke about the most important software products and technology stack, which UASG works with to support Universal Acceptance, presented the results of recent projects, and talked about plans for 2021.
She noted that today UA readiness is quite low: just 9.7 percent of email servers and 11 percent of websites from the studied top 1,000 are ready to handle emails in local languages. “Now there are a lot of people who are already involved in the process of solving UA problems: in addition to six UASG working groups, 500 people have subscribed to our email newsletter. Moreover, many Universal Acceptance enthusiasts are working at the local level to help establish dialogue with software developers and improve user experience in their countries,” Maria Kolesnikova added.
It was also noted in the discussion that dialogue with large developers is possible when they understand that the absence of Universal Acceptance support would result in the loss of clients. State support, when the government’s example encourages the business community to introduce internet identifiers in local languages, also plays an important role.
“The UASG’s main task is to ensure support for all domains and email addresses currently on the internet so that final users would receive high-quality services. However, it is necessary to identify what exactly needs further work in order to fix it. This is the basic principle of working to improve the level of Universal Acceptance support that UASG working groups follow. The UASG uses the results of tests and analyses to develop training materials, technical solutions and the necessary documentation to finalize software products, technologies and standards. And this work not only includes UASG members, but also UA enthusiasts all over the world,” Maria Kolesnikova summed up.
The full recording of the session is available at https://youtu.be/avtxGDcUpJ0.
