Re: Karen Yu's suggestion ICANN IDNs — Well yes, absolutely, ICANN should have IDNs and be using IDNs. It is an obvious thing to do and should have been done a long time ago. Furthermore, ICANN usage of IDNs should be up front and publicised and have equal ranking with icann.org (I am thinking here of companies that defensively register IDNs but then keep quiet about them) So it should be standard practice when quoting icann.org one should include it's IDNs. ICANN should, IMHO, have multiple IDNs, sufficient to include all the human language scripts encompassed by existing ccTLDs & NewgTLDs André Schappo On 18 Mar 2016, at 05:56, Don Hollander wrote:
The following two passages from the Public Forum on Thursday in Marrakech:
KAREN YU:
Okay. I'm Karen Yu from ZDNS. We are an RSG member, but I'm acting as my personal capacity for this question. So we have talked about universal acceptance for a while, but it seems it has been moving really slow. So I think ICANN make -- do something to accelerate the development of this.
So, for example, to our best knowledge, ICANN currently only use ASCII domain for the official website. So maybe why not ICANN adopt an IDN for the website, for example, to all?
[ Applause ]
MIKE SILBER:
Thank you very much, Karen. As an interested observer, I've noticed some significant effort. But Ram is the chair or co-chair - - I can't remember -- of the universal acceptance working group. Maybe you could respond to that.
RAM MOHAN:
Thank you, Mike. Thank you for bringing this up. It's a very important topic. Universal acceptance is crucial for the people of the world to actually access the Internet the way it was intended and not only in ASCII or -- so I think your idea is very good. There are many other ideas like that that come through. We will certainly make sure that staff take a look at that and make a determination.
And I would go even further. It's not just the website but it's also how emails come through, what happens when emails come in for registration on the ICANN website, for example, where they're internationalized email addresses. So there's a whole host of it.
Thank you for your comments, and we take it fully on board. There's very strong support from the board, from the staff, and to the community on universal acceptance.
—
Yes. Good afternoon. My name is Tony Harris. I'm with the ISPCP constituency. I'm also a new registry. And I just wanted to thank the board for having helped us launch the universal acceptance steering group. I am extremely impressed with the progress we are making. We have a dream team of technical experts from some of the largest companies, the community, and staff, and I do have to say I disagree with comments that I heard today about it going slowly.
On the contrary, we are making great progress.
Obviously, a lot of evaluation had to be done how to address the vast community of programmers, implementers, and system administrators worldwide, and collect the relevant materials to be able to address this successfully.
I'm happy to say this is very much on track and I just wanted to say this is great work being done. Thank you very much.
RAM MOHAN:
Thank you to everyone in the community. This is really a community effort, and I think from the board, what you'll find is very strong and sustained and persistent support for this program. In many ways we're trying to emulate what the board had done with the IDN program several years ago with providing strong support. There's an overlap of IDN and universal acceptance as well.