On May 27, ICANN and APTLD held the concluding seminar, Universal Acceptance: Its Impact and Next Steps, of a UA regional training program, organized by ICANN and regional top-level domain organizations. The program is designed to increase awareness about UA challenges and efforts taken to address them, as well as to boost interaction with key industry stakeholders.
The ICANN-APTLD program, launched in 2021, aims to raise awareness of Universal Acceptance in the Asia-Pacific region, help build capacity to deal with existing challenges, and assist national registries and other stakeholders in developing and implementing robust systems and policies that accommodate the expanded use of IDNs, New gTLDs and relevant email addresses.
The roundtable discussion, also called The ccTLD Knights of the Round Table and the Quest for Universal Acceptance, was attended by Sarmad Hussain (ICANN), Leonid Todorov (APTLD), Maria Kolesnikova (Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ), Jiankang Yao (CNNIC), Pensri Arunwatanamongkol (THNIC), Shubham Saran (NIXI), Grigory Sagyan (ISOC Armenia) and other experts.
Maria Kolesnikova, chief analyst at the Coordination Center, spoke about the main approaches to requirements of providing UA for a national registry, as well as about events held by the center for various interested groups and resources that have updated information and educational materials regarding UA.
She also noted the achievements of the Поддерживаю.РФ project, whose website contains Russian-language documents on the work with IDNs and EAI, including the standards and recommendations on updating relevant software in the TLD .РФ, and the continuously updated catalogue of software products with their support for IDN and EAI protocols.
Maria Kolesnikova also spoke about the joint efforts of Поддерживаю.РФ and hosting provider REG.RU in testing a fully Cyrillic email address, which provided Russian developers of software, mobile apps and online services with the opportunity to receive test Cyrillic email addresses.
“I consider it crucially important to organize and develop cooperation at the local and regional levels and involve representatives of various interested parties, such as the IT and business community, the state sector and end users, in the process of implementing Universal Acceptance. We see now that the issue of comprehensive support for all existing domain names and email addresses is a matter of interest not only for the registries of IDNs and New gTLDs, but also international organizations and associations at the level of governments and ministries. And this gives an additional boost to this process,” Maria Kolesnikova added.
