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By Gideon Mutembei
Nairobi, Kenya: The Internet Society Kenya chapter conducted technical training at Zetech University Ruiru Campus to promote Universal Acceptance awareness, increase technical knowledge to address remediation, and promote adoption to ensure all valid domain names and email addresses work in all software applications.
The Domain Name System (DNS), the internet phone book, was initially limited to classics like .com or .org, but of late, we have gotten. Music. tech, and even. Nairobi, plus domains in scripts like Arabic and Cyrillic, among others.
The first training provides an overview of Universal Acceptance (UA) and how to support it for technology managers. This is followed by providing technical details on how to configure email servers to support and deploy email addresses in local languages and scripts. The end part covers the technical details on how to program websites and applications with UA support, aimed at software developers.
The internet should work for everyone, no matter where you are or the language you speak; however, it doesn’t work that way. It’s this gap that society aims to bridge to ensure everyone has equal access to the opportunities brought by the internet. We need solutions that empower all internet users to bring it to those left out. Community-centered connectivity solutions, like community networks, can help.
A community network is when individuals come together to establish and maintain an internet connection themselves- talk of the internet by the people, for the people.Kenya’s internet usage is booming, but gaps in UA hold us back. Take, for example, a student in rural Mombasa struggling to apply for a Scholarship and this is rejected just because the email uses .co.ke.
A Farmer in Kirinyaga using a .ke domain to sell crops online or a start-up in Nairobi launching a site with .africa to reach the continent.
Your uncle John is typing his email in his mother tongue scripts without it breaking, without UA. These daily scenarios hit roadblocks; it’s like having a passport, but you are denied service because the system doesn’t recognize your language.
Universal Acceptance is the idea that all domain names, emojis, and scripts, whether in Swahili, Hindu, or Arabic, should work flawlessly online. Imagine the internet as a global party, UA makes sure everyone is invited, no matter your language. We are all encouraged to join the International internet community by building a truly global multilingual internet for all.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), community formed the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), a volunteer-led organization supported by ICANN org, that aims to promote UA awareness and increase technical knowledge to address UA remediation and promote UA adoption. To address the multifaceted challenges of UA, the UASG has identified multiple stakeholders that are critical to UA adoption: technology developers, email tool and service providers, the sector public, Top Level Domain (TLD) registries and registrars, and academia.
