ICANN: There are no underlying infrastructure obstacles to the accessibility of any TLDs

ICANN, in conjunction with the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) announced the availability of a new report: An Analysis of New gTLD Universal Acceptance. Universal Acceptance (UA) is the concept of removing all technical barriers that might hinder a user from accessing any name in any top-level domain (TLD) from any web browser, email client, or other Internet application on any computer or electronic device. The report, sponsored by ICANN, is available here [PDF, 1.63 MB].

APNIC Labs, the research arm of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), conducted the tests and analysis, which included measuring overall and per-country acceptance of certain generic top-level domains (gTLDs) by end-users and the domain name system (DNS) as a whole. The tests show that there were no underlying infrastructure obstacles to the accessibility of any TLDs.

“These results were in-line with our expectations,” said ICANN’s Chief Technology Officer, David Conrad. “However, there will need to be changes to systems and software to fully leverage the global opportunities these new TLDs enable.”

Conrad went on to note that the results of the APNIC Labs tests identified occasional problems with Adobe’s Flash product working in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox when accessing Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) TLDs.

UASG Chair Ram Mohan said “The problems identified in the report resulted in a larger than expected number of IDN TLDs being unresolvable, clearly an issue for Universal Acceptance. The UASG is reaching out to Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe to further investigate and mitigate this issue identified in the report, and ensure problems are resolved for all TLDs.” Mohan also strongly encouraged members of the Internet community to join the UASG and facilitate the proliferation of Universal Acceptance for all TLDs.

To learn more about the Universal Acceptance visit the UASG Wiki or ICANN’s UA webpage. Interested parties are also invited to join the discuss list: https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/ua-discuss.