The Internet is Evolving: Can You Help Pave the way?

By Baher Esmat, Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement - Middle East & Managing Director - Middle East & Africa (MEA)

In a previous article, “The Internet is Evolving; Are Your Systems Keeping Pace?” I introduced the concept of Universal Acceptance (UA) of domain names, what it means and why it matters. 

In this article, I’m going to touch on the efforts of diverse group of committed volunteers, that have helped in spreading the word about UA and advancing its adoption at the global level. 

Over the past five years their work is what has allowed us to get this far, achieving important milestones in making UA a global reality. It is important, because it will not only allow millions of people around the world to fully access the Internet in their own native languages, it will also allow billions access to a continuously expanding and evolving domain name space.

To achieve this, a lot of work must be done to pave the way. 

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) came to be in 2015. A community-based team of industry leaders supported by ICANN, it has led the effort to prepare the global online community for the next billion Internet users through the UA process.

To help in furthering the UA cause, the UASG Ambassador Program was launched in 2018. The program relies on committed industry leaders and UA experts to raising awareness around UA and Email Address Internationalization (EAI) within their respective spheres and to target audiences. This is a growing program, and there is great interest in expanding membership. As of this year, the UA Ambassador Program has a total of 12 ambassadors from eight different countries namely Benin, China, Egypt, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey, and USA. If this sounds interesting to you, I strongly encourage you to look here for more information on how to get involved and become a UASG Ambassador. 

Another more recent project launched last year, to complement outreach efforts, was the UA Local Initiatives. Led by regional community members across the globe, these local initiatives encourage the more localized sharing of information outreach and promoting adoption of UA within the region. Their activities generally fall under three areas:

•Technical collaboration. They work with local industry, technology developers, and service providers to implement UA readiness practices. This can happen in many ways, such as technical trainings, hackathons, as well as testing websites and email systems. 
•General Outreach. They approach regional events where members of the UA Local Initiative can present UA matters, reports, and case studies to boost wider adoption. 
•Public Sector Engagement.-Here, the focus is on engaging with government policy makers, and relevant standards bodies to discuss readiness of e-government websites. This includes updating procurement policies to take UA readiness requirements into consideration. 

Since the UA Local Initiatives program was launched, several have been set up. For instance, In Eastern Europe, the local initiative set up represents seven countries from the region, but there are also more country specific ones including China, India, and Thailand.

This is another initiative where more active participation can help expound awareness of UA-readiness efforts. The Middle East region should be part of this unique opportunity and effort. Whether this is approached as a regional collaborative effort or country specific focus, the need for your participation is certain.  If you are interested in learning more and exploring this, please email uaprogram@icann.org. 

The work of the UASG is important. Made up of representatives from more than 120 companies (including Afilias, Apple, CNNIC, Eco, i2 Coalition, ICANN, Google, Microsoft, NIXI, THNIC and Yandex), governments and community groups, it is helping to make the Internet more inclusive. 

The work they do, will allow communities around the world, including those who are yet to come online, to have full use of the a continuously expanding and evolving domain name space. But they cannot do it alone. They need committed volunteers from across the world, to help pave the way to this truly multilingual Internet.

Every effort counts. 

For more information on resources from the blog:

UASG Working Groups 
UASG Working Group Membership