On March 31, a regional conference to mark Universal Acceptance Day (UADay2026) was held in Yerevan. The event brought together representatives of national domain registries and leading international organizations, including ICANN, the International Telecommunication Union, the Internet Society, UNESCO, and others.
At the opening session, Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, emphasized the importance of international cooperation in achieving universal acceptance:
“Representatives of national registries from Armenia, Belarus, Russia, and Serbia are present here today. This level of cooperation demonstrates that universal acceptance is a shared goal requiring joint efforts across the global internet community. We are also working actively to solve these issues and are supporting initiatives aimed to develop the Cyrillic domain .РФ,” he said.
Andrey Vorobyev also talked about the Coordination Center’s youth projects such as Internet Governance Summer School, RIGF special course, the Coordination Center’s Youth Council, and the Digital Reality discussion club and podcast. Participants were invited to attend the 16th Russian Internet Governance Forum (RIGF 2026), scheduled for April 7–8 in Moscow.
The keynote address was delivered by Theresa Swinehart, Senior Vice President of Global Domains and Strategy. She underscored the importance of sustained global collaboration, stressing that the internet should not be taken for granted and a great deal of effort is required to maintain its stability and functionality.
At a session titled Local Languages, Global Internet: Supporting Local Languages as a Key Element of Digital Infrastructure, Maria Kolesnikova, Coordination Center Chief Analyst, presented Russia’s experience in expanding linguistic diversity within the Cyrillic domain .РФ. In particular, she noted that in 2025, 26 additional characters from the alphabets of 18 official languages of Russia were incorporated into the domain system, which has enabled the registration of domain names in national languages, contributing to a more inclusive digital environment. As of now, approximately 2,000 such domains have been registered, with the Tatar and Bashkir languages being among the most widely used.
In her remarks, Maria Kolesnikova highlighted the fact that the integration of national languages into the digital space in Russia is being implemented systematically at all levels, from adopting a state language policy and establishing Day of Languages of the Peoples of Russia to their including in addressing systems, online translators, speech recognition technologies, online encyclopedias, and language keyboards.
Arevik Martirosyan, a member of the Coordination Center’s Youth Council and head of the School of International Cybersecurity, took part in the session on multilingual internet development, where she presented findings from the study on state and international policies on digital multilingualism.
“Language presence on the internet is becoming a key factor in digital integration as well as a separate sphere of state policy and regulation. At the same time, a new form of digital inequality is emerging: a linguistic divide. Languages that are better represented in content, media, and AI systems have significantly greater opportunities for full participation in digital society,” she stressed.
The first global Universal Acceptance Day was held in 2023. It became a truly worldwide event, attracting more than 10,000 participants and featuring over 50 events across 40 countries. The Universal Acceptance Day regional conference in Yerevan was among its first events, supported by members of the Universal Acceptance Regional Coordination Group of CIS and Eastern Europe, including the Internet Society NGO (Armenia’s national domain registry) and the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
