Universal Acceptance Steering Group

Universal Acceptance Steering Group, or UASG is an administrative group formed by ICANN in February 2015. It is tasked with undertaking activities that will target Universal Acceptance of all ASCII domain names, ASCII email addresses, IDN domain names, and IDN email.

A summary of their duties is as follows:

• Working closely with staff to drive efforts related to Universal Acceptance
• Developing budgets (resource, staffing and money) necessary to complete specific projects and develop sourcing strategies
• Prioritizing efforts requested by domain name industry participants, registrants and Internet users, and ICANN and make recommendations tothe steering committee
• Identifying collaborative opportunities in new communities
• Overseeing the development of informational materials for various stakeholders (including coordinating with industry efforts) to incentivize and facilitate resolution of UA-related issues
• Studying the need and requirements for appropriate repositories (and advocate for their development/deployment by ICANN or through collaboration with appropriate industry efforts)
• Following up with the deployment of ICANN internal policies to support UA
• Collecting data and developing measurements/indices/surveys to measure UA readiness
• Establishing milestones to continue to track progress of UA
• Inviting non-ICANN community to the initiative and proactively reach out to non-ICANN community events/initiatives in order to have access to needed talents and skills

Members

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) will be made up of ICANN community members as well as non-ICANN community experts. Each member will be counted on to contribute in some area of expertise needed by this program.

• Ram Mohan, Chair - CTO of Afilias
  • "Providing diversity and choice are important to the Internet community. While the DNS infrastructure is able to support diversity, it’s now important to make sure that all the software that uses the Internet is able to also support the Diversity."
• Edmon Chung, Vice Chair - .asia
  • "Many of the next Billion Internet users will come from the non-Latin based language communities. It’s vital that they have equal access to all the services on the Internet."
• Christian Dawson, Vice Chair - works with Internet Infrastructure providers
  • "We need to get the global Internet community aware that the world has moved beyond .com and that there will soon be more than a thousand names to choose from."
• Rich Merdinger, Vice Chair - Vice President of Domains at GoDaddy
  • "It's imperative that all registrants have equal opportunity and this Universal Acceptance initiative is important for choice and diversity on the Internet. GoDaddy is fully behind this initiative."