Skip to main content
Resources

Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG)

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) was founded in 2015. It is a volunteer-led initiative tasked with undertaking activities that effectively promote Universal Acceptance (UA) through its multiple working groups, local initiatives, and UA Ambassadors. The group is made up of more than 500 individuals representing multiple organizations, businesses, and the ICANN community. The UASG is supported and funded by ICANN.

For more information about the UASG and how to get involved, visit: https://uasg.tech/, and follow the UASG on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.

UASG Working Groups

UASG Working Group (WG) Role
Technology WG Oversees remediation work on standards, programming languages, tools, and development platforms.
Email Address Internationalization (EAI) WG Oversees engagement with email software and service providers to make them EAI-ready.
Measurement WG Identifies UA-readiness gaps in tools and technologies.
Communications WG Oversees communication strategy and its execution in collaboration with other working groups.
Local Initiatives WG Conducts regional UA awareness, training, and stakeholder engagements.
UA Ambassador Program Organizes training and outreach at national and regional levels.

Join the UASG

You can be a part of this community effort:

Key Resources

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."