[EURO-Discuss] [At-Large] UA Days

Wed Apr 3 16:18:52 UTC 2024

 Evan, 
It seems to me that the function of UA day is inherently NOT directed at end users.  It is directed at getting vendors, those who provide software interfaces for end users, to make provision for IDNs.  End users are, of course, wildly unlikely to be writing their own browsers, email systems, etc., so they don't really need to be involved.  (Except to the extend that it would be useful to show some user demand when trying to convince vendors to become IDN compatible.)  
Making end users aware of the option to use non-ASCII characters for these is, to my mind, an entirely separate discussion.  Both whether it is a worthwhile effort and how to go about it if so.  It is also something that would really need to be deferred until something like Universal Acceptance is available on at least the most widespread browsers and email systems.  Pitching to end users, when the software they use does not yet support IDNs, would be counterproductive.
Bill Jouris    On Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 04:52:15 AM PDT, Evan Leibovitch via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:  

 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. 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, 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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