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Resources

Universal Acceptance (UA) Initiatives

UA Expert Working Group (UA EWG)

Established in August 2025, the UA EWG is working on developing guidelines for ICANN's work on UA adoption and implementation.

Universal Acceptance Committee, Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO)

Established by ccNSO in July 2023, the UAC aims to provide the ccTLD community a platform to interact and share information at a global level and with other groups under the ICANN umbrella on topics related to UA and IDNs.

Universal Acceptance and Internationalized Domain Names Working Group (UA-IDN WG), Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)

At the November 2019 ICANN66 Public Meeting in Montreal, the GAC established a UA-IDN WG to help the committee track, consider and address matters and topics relevant to governments in those areas.

Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG)

The UASG was founded in 2015 as a volunteer-led initiative tasked with undertaking activities that effectively promote UA through its multiple working groups, local initiatives, and ambassadors. The UASG's charter asked to "drive action over the course of 10 years" with the coordination and support of ICANN. ICANN fulfilled its commitment to support the UASG for a decade, and celebrated the UASG's 10 years of work at ICANN83 in Prague, and published a report highlighting the UASG's achievements.

For UA-related work conducted by the UASG, please see https://uasg.tech.

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."