Dynamic Coalition for DNS Issues

The Dynamic Coalition for DNS Issues (DC-DNSi) was established to foster a multistakeholder discussions around DNS issues that complement the work being done within ICANN and the IETF. The group held its first meeting at the 2018 Internet Governance Forum in Paris, France.

Universal Acceptance[edit | edit source]

The initial focus of the DC-DCNSi will be Universal Acceptance and will look to build on the work done by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG).

The DC-DNSi states that it believes "something as fundamental as language should not be a barrier to using the internet, and UA is about removing those technical barriers" The group cites four premises that motivate its work:

Universal Acceptance (UA) helps mitigate the digital divide by providing a more natural, familiar way to access the internet.
UA has the economic potential to benefit enterprises by increasing the markets they could serve with products and services.
IDNs help to enhance linguistic diversity in cyberspace.
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are accurate predictors of the language of web content.

Framework[edit | edit source]

In the initial meeting, Afilias, a founding member and secretariat of the DC, put forth a framework for moving from awareness to implementation of UA:

Awareness – Informing people about the problem, the importance of resolution, and how they can help. This phase involves broad, public knowledge building. The work product here is expected to drive interest and requires production in numerous languages, as localization is a key part of information sharing, especially when pitching facilitation of technology in multiple languages!
Buy-in –Translating the need for UA into specific relevance of an organization. Once a business, government, academia or NGO is generally aware of the challenges, this phase provides the materials or information to help convince them that implementation is important for their organization and should be a priority.
Completion – The act of implementing standards and protocols. Once an organization decides to adopt, we need to make it easy for them to implement by having all of the technical resources identified and organized in one place. Fortunately, much of this has been done by the UASG.