UA Day 2024 Report Highlights Strong Interest in Universal Acceptance AdoptionSarmad Hussain

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) have published the Universal Acceptance (UA) Day 2024 Report, which provides a comprehensive overview of participation numbers, types of sessions held, and promotional efforts for the second annual UA Day. UA Day 2024 attracted participation from thousands of members in the global Internet community and garnered nearly 50 percent more session proposals than the inaugural 2023 event.

Universal Acceptance ensures that all domain names and email addresses, regardless of language or script, work in Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems. UA is key to enabling a more digitally inclusive and multilingual Internet.

UA Day was established in 2023 as an opportunity to engage and mobilize technical and language communities, companies, governments, and Domain Name System (DNS) industry stakeholders to better understand the benefits of UA. Following the success of UA Day 2023, the second annual UA Day was organized in 2024, consisting of multiple types of events focused on creating UA awareness, capacity, and strategy. UA Day events were held between March and May 2024 to allow flexibility for local organizers, with most events taking place on or around 28 March. The call for proposals continued to include the event types from UA Day 2023, including UA awareness, technical training, and strategy sessions.

In addition to those three categories, two new event types were introduced this year, including UA academic curricula sessions, focused on integrating Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) and UA-related topics into existing technical curricula. Event organizers also held UA adoption sessions, in which participants conducted a UA adoption exercise and shared challenges and solutions around becoming UA-ready. The two new event types comprised nearly a third of the 52 events held this year, with three UA academic curricula sessions and 12 UA adoption sessions. UA adoption events, in particular, are very important because they not only build technical capacity, but also demonstrate real-world adoption, encouraging others to be UA-ready.

UA Day 2024 Participation Highlights:

• Total participants: 6,544
• Proposals received: 133
• Events held: 52
• Countries/territories represented: 47
• Languages represented: 23 (Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Bangla, Bemba, Burmese, Chinese, English, French, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Korean, Lao, Macedonian, Nyanja, Portuguese, Serbian, Sesotho, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, and Thai)

UA Day events were held by regional and local organizations, the UASG, global partners, and ICANN. This year's keystone UA Day event was held in Belgrade, Serbia, on 28 March in partnership with the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS).

Thanks to all who organized, participated, and helped make this year's event a success. For more information about UA Day 2024, read the full recap report. For a gallery of photos from UA Day events worldwide, visit ICANN's Flickr page. To learn more about UA, visit icann.org/ua and uasg.tech, and follow the hashtag #Internet4All on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X.