The Internet is Evolving: Universal Acceptance is Making Progress

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

This is the third article in the Universal Acceptance Series.

In the previous articles, I introduced the concept of Universal Acceptance (UA) of Internet domain names, and outlined the community efforts to promote UA at the global level. 

In this article, I am going to highlight some of the work undertaken by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), and look at the results of two of studies conducted by them in assessing the state of UA readiness. These studies identified the UA gaps from web browsers to email acceptance by websites, and from Email Address Internationalization (EAI) support in email systems to programming tools used to develop applications. 

The first study was to determine the acceptance of email addresses based on the new top-level domains, both the short and long ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) domains (e.g. .xyz, .website) and the non-Latin script domains know as, Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) domains (e.g. .شبكة).

Fifty popular websites in twenty different countries were tested, including Argentina, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, China, Egypt, Germany, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Kuwait, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Sweden, Thailand, and Turkey. 
The results of the tested websites revealed a gradual improvement in UA readiness since 2017, where:
•98% support email addresses with short ASCII top-level domains (up from 97% in 2019 and 91% in 2017)
•85% support email addresses with long ASCII top-level domains (up from 84% in 2019 and 78% in 2017)
•11% support email addresses in Arabic and Chinese characters (up from 7% and 8% respectively in 2019 and 8% in 2017)

Yet, there clearly is more work that needs to be done. This is especially true with regards to the support of Arabic email addresses in websites, including websites in Arab countries such as Bahrain, Egypt, and Kuwait. 

The second study measured the EAI readiness. EAI is the protocol that allows email addresses that incorporate IDN components, meaning non-Latin script, to function correctly within the email system. To that effect, several tests were conducted between 2018 – 2020 on a wide range of tools and services from the email software ecosystem. The findings of these tests showed that while some email systems do a fairly good job in handling EAI, others still lack support of this important protocol. The UASG is therefore continuing its EAI testing efforts, with a wider focus including new areas of the email ecosystem such as address books and spam filters.

The findings of these studies, and others, can be found in the Universal Acceptance Readiness Report 2020, along with links to the more detailed technical documentation. The graph below gives you a snapshot of the UA work in 2020.



So far, the UASG through the work of the UA Local Initiatives and the UA Ambassadors have made significant efforts in reaching out to software community in various regions around the world, and there has been an increasing demand from stakeholders to learn more about how to fix UA issues. 

ICANN is committed to supporting these efforts and to building on what has been achieved to further advance the UA readiness at the global level. 

The question to you dear reader is: Are you part of this evolution? Are you UA ready? 

You can check to see if your mail server advertises support for receiving internationalized email addresses here. 

For more information on UA readiness click here.