On December 15, the annual in-person meeting of the Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance was held at the office of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ. The meeting was held in a hybrid format. The meeting participants discussed the results of the working group’s activities over the past year, and also determined strategic directions and a work plan for 2024.
The Chairman of the Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance, Maria Kolesnikova, presented a report on the work completed by group members in 2023 in four main areas of activity: providing support on the technical aspects of implementing universal acceptance, increasing the level of knowledge of various stakeholders in the field of universal acceptance, interaction with government agencies and manufacturers of domestic software to expand support for Cyrillic domain names and email addresses.
The meeting participants noted the relevance and need to continue work on the main areas of activity in 2024, for which, based on the materials of the in-person meeting, a plan for the working group’s activities next year will be prepared.
“During 2023, much attention was paid to the issues of import substitution of software; domestic software products and services were actively developing and continue to develop. And right now, when a large-scale process of forming a software infrastructure based on Russian software is underway, it is so important to take into account the need to implement full support for Russian-language Internet identifiers, primarily Cyrillic domain names included in the Russian national domain zone. Therefore, we will continue our work in this direction,” Maria Kolesnikova said.
The Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance was created in 2020 to assist in the implementation of technical standards in the field of supporting internationalized domain names and postal addresses and implementing the concept of universal acceptance.
The members of the working group are representatives of Russian organizations, as well as independent experts interested in increasing the level of technical support for internationalized domain names and email addresses in all applications, systems and services in Russia. Today, the working group includes representatives of Russian Cyrillic top-level domain registries, accredited registrars, technical and cybersecurity specialists, lawyers, marketers and representatives of the scientific community.
