[At-Large] UA Days

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hello Haida,

On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 5:05 AM Hadia Abdelsalam Mokhtar EL miniawi via
At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:


> I fully agree with you that raising users awareness and knowledge about
> the possibility of having domain names and email addresses in their own
> languages is important.  I can tell you that nearly every time I
> participated in a session related to the DNS and/or ICANN and I raised the
> topic of domain names and IDNs, hardly anyone in the session was aware of
> the existence of Arabic domain names. How can they demand or understand the
> need for it when they are barely aware of its existence?
>

ICANN first published IDN guidelines in 2003
<https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-guidelines-2003-06-20-en>. That
there is so little awareness of them after more than 20 years of existence,
perhaps suggests that little demand exists. That is, few people, companies
or governments are asking ICANN or its community what solutions it is
offering so that IDNs may be offered in response.

WhatsApp and ChatGPT support more than 50 languages, Facebook more than
100, Google Search and Twitter more than 150 each. Most chat and broadcast
platforms as well as applications and operating systems enable Unicode so
that anyone can use whatever script their input device can handle. Indeed
platforms such as QQ and Yandex were designed primarily for use in
non-Latin-script environments. In this world in which people today easily
access the Internet in the language of their choice using existing methods
on even the simplest of access devices, what specifically is the *public*
need for IDNs? Search engines from multiple sources can take a request from
anyone in their own script and language, and find the appropriate resource
regardless of what its domain name happens to be. This could, indeed, work
with a single domain and a flat namespace.


> Our mission has two aspects: Raising awareness about the existence of IDNs
> and encouraging users who realize the benefits of IDNs to demand them.
>

What reason for confidence do you have that raising awareness of IDNs will
create demand that does not yet exist? The technical and government
communities within ICANN have had two decades to spread the word about IDN
benefits, yet that message has not gained traction far outside the ICANN
community.

Even UA Day, as an outreach effort, continues to  insist on top-down
efforts rather than bottom-up. From the ICANN report on last year's UA Day
<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/universal-acceptance-day-01jun23-en.pdf>,
*not a single event* anywhere in the world targeted end-users, application
developers, or the mainstream news media (page 10 of the report). The
"outreach" is only being done to comfortable audiences of insiders who
won't ask embarrassing questions like "who actually wants this besides
domain sellers?". Meanwhile, the general public of end-users -- the
constituency ALAC claims to represent -- employs the many existing, easier
and cheaper ways to communicate in any language with each other and with
Internet content and services.

To me, IDN's current boosters remain because of (a) financial
self-interest, (b) the sunk cost of decades of volunteer effort and
emotions, and/or (c) their own deep lack of awareness regarding what the
world has already done to solve the challenges of multilingual access.

The real awareness that I see absent is that IDNs have been met by
widespread public indifference, if not rejection, despite 20 years of
availability and promotion. A year's worth of more UA days is not going to
change that, because simply it's an inferior solution to what has already
been solved.

Cheers,

- Evan
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