On March 28, a regional conference, Universal Acceptance Day, was held in Yerevan. The event, marking the first global Universal Acceptance Day, was organized by the Internet Society NGO (which manages Armenia’s ccTLD) with the support of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ. Both registries are members of the Universal Acceptance Regional Coordination Group of CIS and Eastern Europe. The Coordination Center experts who attended the conference spoke about the importance of Universal Acceptance of domain names and email addresses, ways to promote this and the technical aspects of implementation.
Avet Poghosyan, Deputy Minister of High-Tech Industry, Igor Mkrtumyan, chairman of the board of ISOC AM, ICANN Board Member Danko Jevtovic, UASG Chair Ajay Data and Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev spoke at the opening of the conference.
Andrey Vorobyev noted that modern society is clearly interested in a complete resolution of the Universal Acceptance problem, and it is gratifying that more and more attention is being paid to it, not only in various countries, but also at the international and regional levels. “The registries that manage TLD .RU/.РФ and .AM/.հայ have been working together for years, and Armenia’s Internet Society has always been an example of hard work and dedication to Universal Acceptance. It is very symbolic that Armenia was chosen to host the first Universal Acceptance Day in the region. I hope that next year, Global Universal Acceptance Day participants will discuss not only initiatives to promote Universal Acceptance around the world, but also achievements in its technical implementation,” he added.
At the plenary session, representatives of international internet organizations (ISOC, ICANN, APTLD, etc.) and other participants discussed the prospects for the development of the internet as a multilingual environment in which users from different countries will be able to communicate in their native language, as well as plans for further development of multilingual domains. For example, Mikhail Anisimov, ICANN Stakeholder Engagement Manager Eastern Europe and Central Asia, reported on the preparations for the launch of the second round of the New gTLD program, and said that ICANN expects to receive plenty of applications for delegation of new IDN top-level domains from language communities that are not represented on the internet.
Maria Kolesnikova, Chief Analyst at the Coordination Center, spoke at the session on the promotion of IDNs. Maria listed the reasons why the Cyrillic .РФ domain is so popular and outlined the specifics of its promotion. She presented a new service that suggests domain names and shared the Coordination Center’s experience in advancing the Universal Acceptance of Cyrillic IDNs and EAIs email addresses.
“As the registry of the Cyrillic national domain, we are making our systems ready to embrace Universal Acceptance. We have already adjusted our corporate website and mail server, as well as our ticketing system to work correctly with email addresses in Russian,” she added.
Maria Kolesnikova also moderated the session devoted to the technical aspects of implementing IDN and EAI. Vadim Mikhailov, the Coordination Center’s infrastructure consultant, spoke about the Поддерживаю.РФ (I Support .РФ) project, which provides assistance to software manufacturers, and presented some newly developed useful services and materials.
“We have everything ready to bring our systems in line with the Universal Acceptance principles today – not tomorrow, not someday, but right now. We have the standards, a range of ready-to-use software, and libraries that can be integrated in that software. We have a fairly large number of software developers who are potentially ready to fine-tune their solutions, but they need an impulse – a request from users,” he concluded.
The conference ended with a Technical Training on EAI, where UASG Vice Chair Abdalmonem Galila spoke about configuring email systems to support EAI.
The conference also included a working meeting of the Universal Acceptance Regional Coordination Group of CIS and Eastern Europe.
Universal Acceptance Day is an initiative promoted by ICANN and the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) to raise awareness of Universal Acceptance and the technical aspects of its implementation around the world. This year, Universal Acceptance Day consisted of more than 50 events in 40 countries. Global Universal Acceptance Day will be held annually on March 28.
The full video of the conference is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/oTjgC1xQS2Q?feature=share.
