11.03.2016

Getting Next Billion Online –Universal Acceptance

WHD.global sessions “Domain Name Talks”

Internationalized domain names and e-mail addresses may already exist for new languages and alphabets – Han, Cyrillic, Hangul, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew and Greek – but help is still needed to enable universal access.
3.2 billion people are online worldwide, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and around 45 percent of all households have access to the Internet. Despite these impressive figures, it is only since the increasing support of Unicode characters in internationalized domain names (IDN) and e-mail address internationalization (EAI) that people with languages based on Han, Cyrillic, Hangul, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew and Greek have been able to use the Internet to its fullest extent in their mother tongue.

Listen in!

Click the button below to load the content.

Load content

Get here to the shownotes

But even now, not all online portals are yet primed for the opening of a user account with one of the new e-mail addresses. Top-level domains that exceed the previously standard length of two or three characters are also not yet accepted everywhere. Lars Steffen from eco is working on the improvement of Universal Acceptance as part of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), which was established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The UASG is striving to ensure that the Internet becomes truly international – with universal acceptance of the wide variety of new possibilities in domain names.

In this podcast, Lars Steffen explains what the problem is and who needs to be involved in solving it. He gathers the perspectives from other members of the UASG on what needs to be done to enable the next billion access to the Internet.

Hear perspectives from:

  • Don Hollander – ICANN
  • Dusan Stojicevic – Serbian National Internet Domain Registry (RNIDS)
  • Christian Dawson – i2Coalition
  • Mark Svancarek – Microsoft

The UASG wishes to publish a series of documents by April this year which will simplify the job of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Technologies Officers (CTOs), and other IT managers around the globe in expanding their IT infrastructure to include the new languages and alphabets. The first of these are available here: uasg.tech

Interested companies can contact the eco Association at: numbers@eco.de.


WHD session – Domain Name Talks
powered by eco – Association of the Internet Industry

Meet the eco team, eco members and friends over two days of high-quality talks and panel sessions in the Circus Celebration theatre. Topics include Doing Business in Germany, Data Privacy and Surveillance, Market Consolidation in the Data Center Industry, Domain Names and Universal Acceptance, Brand TLDs and geoTLDs.

Wednesday, 16 March 2016: Doing Business in Germany
Thursday, 17 March 2016: eco Domain Name Talks

Venue: CIRCUS CELEBRATION
Time: 10:00–13:00 (including different panels)
All sessions are in English.

Free Ticket-Code: GL165VN

Universal Acceptance – How to enable the next billion users