Universal Acceptance studies: good progress in browsers, major challenges in social media

Universal Acceptance is a cornerstone of a digitally inclusive Internet by ensuring all domain names and email addresses (IDNs) - in any language, script, or character - are accepted equally by all Internet-based applications, devices and systems.

ICANN Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) 2021

At the ICANN meeting in October 2021, Oxford Information Labs presented the outcomes of two studies undertaken during 2021 on behalf of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG): the first was an update on the Universal Acceptance readiness of Browsers; and the other was the first study on Social Media Applications.

The first study was based on a previous study conducted in 2017 on Universal Acceptance readiness in browsers and included a new item for testing on the handling of favourites and bookmarking. The OXIL research team tested 12 of the most popular browsers. 19 URLs made up of IDNs were tested containing different scripts/languages on each browser. Overall, browsers showed good results in terms of the readiness of Universal Acceptance when pasting URLs into the browser.

Browsers & bookmarks

Despite the overall good results for browsers, the addition of testing the validity of saving favourites and bookmarks highlighted some challenges. The results showed that although bookmarks could be saved successfully, they did not always display as an end-user would expect.

Social media platforms and Universal Acceptance

The second study, on the universal acceptance of social media applications, tested 16 of the most popular social media applications worldwide to evaluate the registration, logging in and posting of IDN email addresses and URLs. Overall, the results of the social media application tests show poor Universal Acceptance for authentication using internationalised non-Latin non-ASCII email addresses without exception. No social media application was able to facilitate registration onto the social media application, and therefore log in using an IDN email address.

Once authenticated it gets better

Conversely, once authenticated using a valid Latin ASCII email address or telephone number, the vast majority of the networks tested showed strong readiness for UA when posting internationalised email addresses and fully qualified internationalised URLs using built in posting and private messaging functions with accurate display of these items as pasted and in many cases (as platform policy allowed) accurate conversion to clickable links.

Problems with email routing persists

The study shows that there is currently very poor support for the sending and routing of internationalised email addresses by popular mail clients and relaying servers. The evaluation is that this lack of support may provide some explanation and context to the decision of social media vendors to either block non-Latin non-ASCII email addresses at the point of registration or opt to use a telephone number based authentication system which essentially sidesteps this issue.

Although progress is slow in this area with big players still failing to support reliable routing of internationalised email addresses there is growing robust support being provided in particular by the large cloud-based webmail providers so it would be hoped as this support grows, that the social media vendors will eventually be able to relax their policy without a concern for escalating support issues and cost.

APRALO Online: The role of IDNs in creating a more inclusive internet

On 27 July 2021, ICANN’s Asia Pacific Regional At Large Organisation (APRALO) hosted an online seminar focused on the advancement of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) and the role of IDNs for creating a more inclusive Internet.

This event hosted several speakers to deliver their research and findings on IDNs. The speakers were Emily Taylor of Oxford Information Labs, Sarmad Hussain of ICANN, Justine Chew of APRALO and the session was moderated by Satish Babu, Chair, APRALO & Co-Chair, At-Large IDN Working Group.

Highlights from the IDN World Report 2021

First, Emily Taylor, CEO of Oxford Information Labs (OXIL) presented highlights from the 2021 World Report on IDNs. The presentation provided a focus on the use of IDNs in the Asia-Pacific region, where some of the largest IDN TLDs such as .中国 (China) and .рф (Russia) are located. OXIL’s research showed the growth of IDNs is more volatile than regular domains. Ten years ago IDNs were experiencing a high level of growth but in the past few years IDNs have grown less compared to all domains.

The presentation also covered a recent study on the Universal Acceptance of emails, conducted by OXIL on behalf of EURid for the IDN World Report. The purpose of the study was to investigate the performance of major email clients and services in supporting IDNs. The study found that the underlying message transfer agent (MTA) software has been shown to successfully support IDNs, Unicode email prefixes and Unicode content and headers. However, the issues with MTA supporting IDNs are usually down to a lack of support by custom integrated software used for configuration. OXIL discussed how leading mail clients still have a long way to go to fully support IDNs and achieve UA in email.

The presentation also highlighted other main findings from the EURid UNESCO 2021 IDN World Report. For example, they discussed the linguistic variation and patterns for IDNs and concluded that four scripts comprise more than 90% of IDN registrations and those are Han Chinese, Latin, Cyrillic and Hangul. Also, OXIL showed that the majority of IDN registrations are in the Asia-Pacific region. The World Report’s analysis of IDN scripts and language content over the last ten years supports two key observations. One, the geographical distribution of IDNs reflect the scripts most commonly associated with regional languages clustering in those areas, such as Han script being most common in China for example. Second, the script of IDN is a reliable indicator of the language of web content behind the IDN. In other words, a Cyrillic script IDN name will most likely contain content in the Russian or Bulgarian language. Overall, these findings provide further information and context for the ways in which IDNs can promote and foster linguistic diversity in cyberspace globally - a key priority for UNESCO in support of WSIS action line C8 (Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content).

ICANN and IDNs

Sarmad Hussain Sr Director, ICANN UA & IDN Programs then presented findings on IDNs by first giving a detailed account of IDN implementation since 2003 - the year in which the IDN Guidelines were endorsed by the ICANN Board. It was noted that these Guidelines have since been updated and amended several times. Sarmad described how ICANN responded to concerns expressed by the global IDN community on how Top-Level Domains should reflect labels that, while distinct or different at a purely technical level, would be considered as equivalent by people who speak the language in question. For example, in cases where traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese characters are the same, the resulting IDN TLDs will still have distinct punycode strings for the technical domain label. Initially this may not appear to be problematic but it does raise security concerns because if there are variant labels for two TLDs which appear as identical to users, then end users may easily become confused between the two IDN TLDs. Sarmad noted this could be used as a ransomware trap for end users to fall into.

Sarmad then elaborated on the findings of Universal Acceptance from the UASG027. This showed encouraging findings for IDN progress, such as email addresses are increasingly being accepted by global websites. In fact, the email address internationalisation (EAI) now has a working EAI Checker online, which is a globally accessible widget enabling users to ascertain whether the mail server advertises support for receiving EAI emails.

APRALO and IDNS

Justine Chew, ALAC Member & At-Large liaison for Subsequent Procedures gave a brief update on Subsequent Procedures policy recommendations for the next round of IDN new gTLD applications. Justine’s research was also aimed at advancing IDN accessibility and use to create a more inclusive Internet. The recommendations in this presentation were primarily focused on how IDNs can better practice and maintain TLD variants. One of the key recommendations made in this presentation was explaining the need to keep labels and variants together at top level IDNs. Further research recommended how to better organise and manage second level labels in IDNs to prevent confusion and keep TLDs variants distinct and clear for users.

The APRALO event was valuable for the IDN community as speakers were able to share useful IDN resources such as the EAI checker. Consequently, the APRALO event was successful in advancing the understanding of IDNs as it allowed for information sharing from several speakers and researchers of IDNs and provided a forum to share their expertise. The work discussed not only gave listeners insights, but also tangible resources for members of the Internet community to use in creating a more equitable internet environment. The presentations were followed by a lively discussion which highlighted opportunities for how the data and insights shared could be better understood and applied to tangible efforts to make IDNs more widely accessible.

Universal Acceptance at the WSIS Forum 2021

The World Summit on the Information Society’s 2021 forum discussion was titled, ‘Promoting Universal Acceptance as a Prerequisite for Progress in Ensuring Multilingualism and Local Content Generation in Eurasia and Asia Pacific’.

The WSIS forum, co-organized by ITU, UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD, in close collaboration with all WSIS Action Line Facilitators and Co-Facilitators hosted several guest speakers who shared their perspectives on the current state and possible future of Universal Acceptance (UA). The speakers assessed UA’s current environment and made assessments of its future.

Universal Acceptance has far to go.

Across the forum there was a clear consensus Universal Acceptance has far to go to bridge the gap between end users, who would benefit from using their local languages online, and the current technological readiness of UA. The forum highlighted how UA needs to progress faster to catch up with internet users’ multilingualism. While Universal Acceptance typically uses email addresses and websites as the grounds for testing server support for internationalised domain names (IDNs), the speakers at the forum noted testing browsers and email addresses are just the beginning of the usage of IDNs.

The benefits of making advances in Universal Acceptance were discussed, and many agreed UA has the potential to go beyond simply being useful to users in their own regions and it could in fact promote multilingualism in the world more generally. However, the potential advantages of UA are met with significant obstacles in the most basic use of IDNs, such as in email addresses and website domains, which partly explains the slow rate of uptake for IDNs. Firstly, the awareness of UA remains low for internet users and, according to one speaker, many graduate computer scientists lack basic familiarity with UA.

Universal Acceptance is a basic right for end users.

This year as more national governments have relied upon the internet to share essential health information online throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the lack of Universal Acceptance to support multilingualism online is increasingly leaving behind those who cannot operate online using their mother tongue language. Arguably, as one speaker pointed out, in this context Universal Acceptance is a basic right for end users.

There have been indicators of Universal Acceptance growing momentum - such as ICANN’s dedicated Universal Acceptance Steering Group - but email providers must better handle Internationalised Domain Names to significantly improve the Universal Acceptance landscape.

The role governments have to play as a key stakeholder in improving UA was also discussed. There is often a gap between the ministries or government bodies which work in the domain name environment and those who address cultural and language diversity. While the government has a key role to play, the problems facing Universal Acceptance adoption can only be overcome through small actions by multiple players, because the domain name system is a distributed system.

A successful future for Universal Acceptance will require the work of multiple actors

When the speakers shared their approaches as to how the Universal Acceptance landscape could be best improved, it was clear that a successful future for Universal Acceptance will require the work of multiple actors. First, awareness of what Universal Acceptance is and what it has to offer is a crucial step for this technology to work well. Speakers also noted the need to better understand the demand of Universal Acceptance in order to make the best progress with UA. Second, pitching the benefits of Universal Acceptance to organisations and network suppliers is needed to prompt the required investments needed to support Universal Acceptance. The next billion users of the internet will likely be majority non-English speakers, so it was suggested that the opportunity to capture this next generation of internet users would be a valuable point to bring attention to when appealing to private companies the speakers hope will invest in Universal Acceptance.

Overall, despite the challenges facing Universal Acceptance, a poll taken by all the forum’s participants and speakers showed the vast majority of participants believed Universal Acceptance implementation to be an inevitability for the future of the internet.