Press Release: UA Day 2024: Driving a Multilingual Internet through Universal Acceptance
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) invites the global Internet community to participate in the second annual Universal Acceptance (UA) Day. The keystone UA Day event will be held in Belgrade, Serbia, on 28 March in partnership with the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS) and the volunteer-based Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG). Worldwide supporting events will also be held from March through the end of May.
The inaugural UA Day, held in 2023, was a truly worldwide event, with more than 9,400 participants from over 40 countries/territories taking part in more than 50 global events. Building on that success, UA Day 2024 will continue to rally local, regional, and global stakeholders to encourage UA adoption. UA Day events are a mix of local and regional virtual, in-person, and hybrid informational and technical training sessions. These sessions will be aimed at reaching technical and language communities, tech companies, governments, academia, and Domain Name System (DNS) industry stakeholders to encourage UA adoption in order to achieve a more multilingual and digitally inclusive Internet.
“Being a domain name registry for IDNs .срб and .rs, we regard Universal Acceptance as a path to include, to connect, and to further innovate. UA Day is a history in the making and hosting the global UA Day event is a privilege indeed.” said Dejan Đukić, CEO of RNIDS.
A cornerstone of today’s global Internet, UA offers many benefits for Internet users and the organizations that serve them. Today, there are more than 5.3 billion Internet users, and at least one billion more are expected to come online. Most of the new users live in countries that speak and write in languages other than English. Achieving UA ensures everyone has the ability to experience the full social and economic power of the Internet using a domain name and email address that best aligns with their interests, business, culture, language, and script.
UA is a technical necessity to ensure that all valid domain names and email addresses, regardless of script, language, or character length, can be equally used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems. It is considered a foundational requirement for the continued expansion of the Internet. Since 2009, the landscape for domain names has changed markedly in terms of the number of top-level domain names (TLDs) available, TLD character length, and scripts available (e.g., .photography, .网址, .شبكة, .срб). However, the checks used by many software applications to validate domain names and email addresses often use rules created many years ago.
“The global adoption of Universal Acceptance is critical to ensuring a more inclusive Internet for the next billion people coming online,” said ICANN Interim President and CEO Sally Costerton. “UA Day is a signficant opportunity to mobilize the global Internet community and technical stakeholders who can help make UA a reality.”
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