The EURid and ICANN MoU: What does it mean for IDNs?

New EURid and ICANN collaboration on universal acceptance

On 20th June 2022, EURid, the European registry of the .eu top-level domain (TLD), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) officially announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two institutions. The MoU implies a stronger commitment for the two institutions in two intertwined cooperations: supporting Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) and promoting the Universal Acceptance (UA).

Technical, research and educational activities

The MoU mentions several important collaborations in joint activities around IDNs and UA. EURid and ICANN also intend to cooperate on technical collaborations, research, education, community engagement, and information sharing. The MoU is a statement of intent between EURid and ICANN to strengthen their efforts in achieving an inclusive and multilingual internet.

A daunting challenge

This MoU is a significant milestone for IDNs and UA as EURid and ICANN are two influential actors that have been committed to addressing the problem of internet multilingualism. At the European level, more work on IDNs and UA needs to be done, particularly in non-Latin alphabet domain names, such as .ею (Cyrillic script) and .ευ (Greek script). Better inclusion of European languages and alphabets is also needed to advance digitalisation and digital transformation across Europe. This is in line with the EU Digital Vision to foster the benefit of digitalisation across wider demography, particularly in a diverse socio-linguistic society in Europe. In turn, this potentially brings a positive impact, not only economically, but also socially and culturally in the continent.

Community engagement

The MoU is equally important to bring new best practices in technical collaborations, research, education, community engagement, and information sharing in relation to IDNs and UA. The technical areas are one of the biggest challenges in achieving Universal Acceptance given the complexity of the issues in IDNs. Community engagement is also one to watch on this MoU because it is situated at the core of today’s IDNs problem: reaching out to the communities and stakeholders whose languages and scripts are not entirely integrated into the current internet network system. By engaging with and listening to different communities and stakeholders, EURid and ICANN will be able to get a better understanding of the current state of the affairs and eventually, a better solution for an inclusive internet in Europe.

New precedent for collaboration

Cooperation between different institutions on IDNs and UA is still not common, hence this MoU is an exciting opportunity that will set a new precedent for collaboration. The precedent should also lead to wider cooperation and collaboration of different stakeholders in the future, particularly in the Global South. South America, Asia, and Africa have an enormous diversity of languages that creates various challenges in achieving Universal Acceptance. In the Global South, the multilingualism of the internet is an intertwined challenge with the Digital Divide problem. An improvement of access to internet infrastructure and networks in the Global South needs to go hand-in-hand with a better inclusion of different languages and scripts on the internet in which the MoU between EURid and ICANN can set the precedent. It is previously also done with a similar MoU between EURid and ICANN in 2015 to develop Local Expertise in the Domain Names System (DNS) sector in Africa and the Middle East. The new MoU should ideally lead to wider cooperation and bring significant benefits beyond Europe.

Advantage of the EURid and ICANN MoU

Nevertheless, the MoU between EURid and ICANN is a step forward in the efforts of IDNs and UA. It also comes at the right time when the efforts in achieving UA need refreshment and a new positive mood. The MoU brings back the discourse of the importance of IDNs and UA for a better inclusive internet for all to the centre of discussion among stakeholders. This hopefully signals other stakeholders to refocus and reenergize on IDNs and UA.

IDNs and UA: Moving Forward in the Global South

IDN and UA: Moving Forward in the Global South

The Domain Name System (DNS) discussion has expanded widely in the Global South countries in the past few years. Given DNS’s importance to the internet architecture, many stakeholders increasingly take the topic to the next level. Two of the most appealing topics are Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) and Universal Acceptance (UA). The two topics were recently discussed in an event by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) titled the Middle East Domain Name System Forum (MEDNSF) held on 18th May 2022. The Middle East region is a vibrant digital landscape with significantly growing internet users, yet has multiple challenges given its infrastructure, demographics, and language diversity. The MEDNSF brought the topics of IDNs and UA by inviting prominent speakers from various stakeholders: Emily Taylor (CEO, Oxford Information Labs), Sarmad Hussain (Senior Director, IDNs and UA Programs, ICANN), Sarika Gulyani (Chair, India Universal Acceptance Local Initiative), and Nabil Benamar (Chair, Measurement Working Group, Universal Acceptance Steering Group).

IDNs and UA Challenges in the Middle East

Emily Taylor started the discussion by providing interesting points from IDN Key Report in 2021. The IDN registrations experienced volatile growth compared to ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) in the past few years. Three scripts have dominated IDNs registration: Han, Latin, and Cyrillic. The Arabic script is still far behind in IDN registrations despite its significantly growing internet users. The overall number for Arabic script remains steady in statistics. However, interestingly, there is more percentage of high-quality content compared to parked domain names in Arabic compared to other scripts. It requires more efforts to identify and address specific challenges in the Arabic-speaking region by calling more stakeholders to pay more attention.

Sarmad Hussain followed the discussion by joining Taylor’s call for more efforts and awareness among stakeholders. As the internet is a global phenomenon, Hussain stated the importance of multilingual and multiscript efforts to make the internet accessible and inclusive for all. Hussain brought up a famous quote from Tim Berners Lee, “the web does not connect machines, but it connects people.” This is a reminder for all stakeholders to focus on the people connection in addressing IDNs’ problems. Hussain also mentioned that there was a need of navigation systems to be in local languages as the internet penetrates into wider audiences in the Global South.

Initiatives to Move Forward

The connection between the people is also a significant theme in the discussion, particularly on how to move the IDNs and UA forward to connect more people on the internet. Sarika Gulyani shared her experience and perspective of India in understanding the importance of IDNs and UA. India has 22 official languages with hundreds of different dialects. She also explained that India is one of the biggest data consumers and the world’s second-largest internet user base. One of the government’s initiatives was launching Digital National Identity to reach 1.2 billion people, and this requires IDNs to penetrate into local communities with different languages and scripts. Gulyani also mentioned the importance of initiatives including outreach, technical workshop, and UA-compliance inducement programs to the private sectors. Collaboration is key, especially with the state governments, national internet authorities, and academia. Now, as a result, one of the most symbolic milestones in India’s IDNs is that now the Indian national government website (india.gov.in) is available and can be accessed in different Indian scripts, not only Latin script.

Nabil Benamar also agreed on the importance of initiatives by explaining what the Measurement Working (MW) group in UA steering group has been doing in the past few years. Identity and e-Commerce platforms are two topics the group has been working on recently, particularly how to push those platforms to be more aware of IDNs and UA. Benamar also mentioned outreach as the group’s current priority by calling for more participation at the regional and national levels. Outreach initiatives have been taken in the group by reaching out to students and professors to incorporate the standardisation of IDNs in their curriculum or studies.

Addressing the Challenges

Furthermore, the discussion brought the challenges to be overcome by different stakeholders. Hussain mentioned that his team conducted research on how many top global websites can support the UA. The research finding shows that only 10-20 per cent of a thousand top global websites can support internationalised email addresses in non-ASCII scripts. Hussain emphasised that IDNs are not only about websites, but also email addresses. Benamar also mentioned the significance of training in addressing today’s IDNs and UA challenges. His group has already developed three modules to help the training of IDNs and UA at local level. The modules include a technical overview, technical details on the email and system administrators, and website and application programming with UA support developers.

More Attention, More Initiatives

Overall, the panel comes to the conclusion that the importance of IDNs and UA for the Middle East and Global South requires more attention and initiatives from various stakeholders. The current challenges are not impossible to overcome given how the success of the current initiatives by regional and national stakeholders. With that in mind, more attention and initiatives are needed in the Middle East and Global South. The prospect is promising, but there are still ways to go and to move forward in connecting the people on the internet.

IDN World Report Presented at 7th ICANN Middle East DNS Forum

With the Internet growing to accommodate a higher population around the world every year, the need for fully functional Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) has increased.

The annual ICANN Middle East DNS Forum facilitates conversations around the latest developments in the global domain marketplace, as they relate to the Middle East region. The discussion on the final day of the forum on 7th April 2021, illustrated the benefits of utilising IDNs for the Arabic script as well as other language scripts. It also showcased some solutions to some of the more complex problems we may encounter when using IDNs.

Progress in achieving UA remains slow.

Increasing linguistic diversity on the internet should be of interest to us all, but as we have documented in the IDN World Report, progress in achieving Universal Acceptance (UA) remains frustratingly slow. The Arabic script across different regions has specific rules and variations. Ali Alhoshaiyan from the Communications & Information Technology Commission of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia presented some of the complications that may arise.

Arabic script, which is written from right to left, contains letters that take a different form depending on where they are located in a word. These positional shapes can change if the letter is at the beginning, the middle or the end of the word, and have different joining rules. For example, the sound we associate with “buh,” is ب in Arabic, but can look different depending on where it is positionally in a word. This is an example of ب in each position of a word: ب بل لب It can also sound different depending on variations of the same letter and can look different depending on how and who is writing it. These apply to most of the 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. Around 25 countries claim Arabic as their official or co-official language according to Babbel in 2019, and there are an estimated 313 million Arabic speakers who use different regional variations of the script. Variants can arise when an interpretation of the “same” label in a script appears in IDNs. Defining such variations can be a difficult process, and indeed the management of the variation labels to determine what can be included in Top Level Domains (TLDs) and what is not. A shared set of rules that works consistently across all Arabic script languages is an essential foundation for guaranteeing the uniqueness and universality of every domain name.

Solutions to the complexities of IDNs using the Arabic Script.

Sarmad Hussain Senior Director IDN & UA Programs at ICANN introduced some of the solutions to the complexities of IDNs using the Arabic Script. By bringing together experts from diverse Arabic-speaking communities to agree on a set of variants, the ICANN team were able to bring these definitions together in order to implement the process into an integrated Root Zone Language Generation Rules (RZ-LGR) system. In addition, the management of TLDs through a set of recommendations, was integrated into a report on IDN Variant TLD Implementation in 2019. By providing solutions to these complications, usability will be enhanced worldwide by facilitating a comfortable linguistic environment for those native speakers. Security will also be improved, as issues with variants can cause some security problems such as phishing emails.

The IDN World Report 2020 was presented by Emily Taylor, CEO of Oxford Information Labs. She reviewed the adoption rates of IDNs, as well as discussing other issues relating to Universal Acceptance. The total number of IDNs decreased by 8% when compared to the previous year but generally, the rate of IDNs has been steadily growing year on year. One of the key findings of the IDN World Report was that the geographical distribution of IDN registrations matched the script you would expect across script and language groups. Scripts used in IDNs are also a strong signal of the language used in the web content associated with the IDNs. Whereas overall, the primary language of web content is still English and with a majority percentage of English language sites, the language of web content associated with IDNs are more diverse than that associated with ASCII domains. Lack of Universal Acceptance of the usage of IDNs may be some of the reasons for this. There also seems to be a lack of awareness of IDNs amongst the end user.

In addition, research done by Oxford Information Labs to evaluate full stack email systems for UA adherence revealed some difficulties in relation to UA and the sending, receiving and replying to emails in an environment that supports email address internationalisation.

Use of Arabic script domain names

Arabic script IDNs have experienced a general steady growth across the region although registration levels are still comparatively low. There are high levels of IDNs suspected to be parking, however when comparing the parked content or looking exclusively at the high quality content, the use of Arabic script domain names sees a high proportion in the high quality content category (70%) according to the IDN World Report.

Despite the difficulties which can arise, IDNs help to enhance linguistic diversity in cyberspace and make the internet environment more comfortable for end users around the world. However, Universal Acceptance remains to be a challenge. Further discussions in forums such as the Middle East DNS Forum, collaboration and analysis in reports such as the IDN World Report can support solutions to the difficulties relating to IDNs.