On August 20, the 2021 South Korea Internet Governance Forum (KrIGF) took place. One of its main topics was making the internet more inclusive and promoting the widespread adoption of universal acceptance. This issue is of particular importance for Korean society, as well as for other non-English speaking countries that use national alphabets. It especially concerns email, with recent website surveys around the world showing that only about 11% of websites can accept email addresses in local languages. Moreover, less than 10% of mail servers in the world are configured to support such email addresses.
These problems were discussed at the session Enabling Korean Domain Names and Email Addresses for Inclusive Internet, where Maria Kolesnikova, chief analyst at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, spoke on behalf of the Universal Acceptance Local Initiative in the CIS and Eastern Europe.
In her report, Maria talked about the universal acceptance of all available domain names and email addresses, the need to implement it, its relevance for the development of a multilingual internet, and the advantages universal acceptance offers to a state, business and simple internet users. Forum participants also gained insight into the work of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), and were invited to participate in UASG working groups and create a Universal Acceptance Local Initiative in South Korea.
At the end of the session, there was a discussion of which interested parties could help in expanding the use of internationalized domain names and email addresses in South Korea, how, and what difficulties this process entails. The Korean internet community is doing a lot to this end. For example, in May 2021, the Korean RZ-LGR were finalized and published, aimed at solving the problem of universal acceptance.
“The use of the Korean character set in addressing tools has its own peculiarities and limitations, and it is gratifying to see our colleagues actively working and striving to make internationalized domains and email addresses more accessible to their local community of internet users. For our part, we are always ready to share regional and Russian experience in this area,” Maria Kolesnikova concluded.
