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Event proposals are now being accepted for the third annual Universal Acceptance (UA) Day, to be held on or around 28 March 2025 (between 1 March and 30 May 2025). UA Day, held annually, is an opportunity to rally local, national, regional, and global communities and organizations to spread UA awareness and to promote UA adoption with key stakeholders.

UA is a technical best practice that ensures all valid domain names and email addresses, regardless of script, language or character length, can be equally used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems. Co-organized by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), UA Day 2025 will consist of various virtual and in-person events held by the UASG, ICANN, global partners, and regional and local organizations between 1 March and 30 May 2025.

UA Day 2025 builds on the success of UA Day 2024 and the inaugural UA Day in 2023. Together, the 2023 and 2024 events attracted approximately 15,000 participants worldwide across dozens of countries. These milestone events have helped mobilize technical and language communities, companies, governments and Domain Name System (DNS) industry stakeholders to champion UA on a global scale.

Those interested in organizing a UA Day event must complete the UA Day Event Proposal Form by 11 October 2024.  ICANN will provide limited support for proposed UA Day events based on this group’s recommendations.

The following types of events are eligible for support:

  • UA Awareness: Provide a high-level overview of UA and Email Address Internationalization (EAI), the benefits of being UA-ready, basic technical concepts related to UA and next steps for becoming UA-ready.
  • UA Technical Training: Provide in-depth training on becoming EAI-ready for email system administrators and on becoming UA-ready for software developers.
  • UA Academic Curricula: Work with academic faculty members and experts to integrate Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and UA-related topics into existing technical curricula and design a roadmap.
  • UA Adoption: Conduct a UA adoption exercise and share challenges and solutions to becoming UA-ready, and document your experience. Please note that advance preparatory work and review are required in order to qualify for a UA Adoption event.
  • UA Regional Strategy: Discuss appropriate mechanisms for promoting UA adoption at the local, regional, and national levels.

Proposals will be considered from all relevant organizations, including international, regional and local organizations, technology organizations and companies, open-source communities, standards bodies, email service providers, academia, industry groups, and language communities. 

UA is considered a foundational requirement for the continued expansion of the Internet. Since 2009, the landscape for domain names has changed markedly – in overall number of top-level domain names (TLDs) available, TLD character length and scripts available. However, the checks used by many software applications to validate domain names and email addresses often use rules that do not fully support Universal Acceptance. Achieving UA ensures everybody has the ability to experience the full social and economic power of the Internet using their chosen domain name and email address that best aligns with their interests, business, culture, language, and script.

Questions about UA Day 2025 can be directed to UAProgram@icann.org. A full UA Day event calendar will be published in due course. In the meantime, interact with the UASG on social media (X, Facebook and LinkedIn) using the hashtag #Internet4All.

The UASG

The UASG is a community-led initiative that was formed in 2015 and funded by ICANN. It consists of volunteers from many companies, governments, and community groups. The UASG works to raise awareness of the importance of UA globally, provide free resources to organizations to help them become UA-ready, and measure the progress of UA adoption. To learn more, visit https://uasg.tech/.

About ICANN

ICANN’s mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.