On November 1-2, the forum of the domain industry of the Middle East and North Africa “Domain Days Dubai 2023” was held in Dubai (UAE). There were about 35 studies presented at the event, which drew 150 professional attendees and 35 companies. The forum was organized by Munir Badr, founder and CEO of the UAE's largest domain name registrar and web and cloud hosting company AEserver.com.
Vadim Mikhailov, Consultant for Infrastructure of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, took part in the forum. During the panel session “The state of Middle East & North Africa (MENA) Domain Ecosystem,” he offered to discuss the impact of the upcoming round of the New gTLD program on changing domain name promotion strategies for both national registries and registrars. Participants came to the conclusion that more effort will be required on the part of registries to interact with the audience, and on the part of registrars, it will be necessary to assess the consumer attractiveness of registrations in new domain zones.
At the section dedicated to readiness for Universal Acceptance, Vadim Mikhailov raised the problem of introducing a second level of support for EAI addresses by public email services such as Gmail, MS Live and Yahoo. He noted that popular email services still do not fully support them; in particular, there is no support for hosting addresses with a local part in Unicode.
ICANN Regional Vice President for stakeholder engagement in the Middle East, who participated in the section, responded that ICANN is ready to provide postal services with all the necessary technical information and provide all possible assistance in the implementation of such support, and also suggested that increased interest is needed from the community to fully internationalized postal addresses.
Vadim Mikhailov also held working meetings with representatives of the national registries of Serbia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
