I am not surprised that ICANN is no longer funding the UASG, but mildly surprised at the continuance of UA Days.

This is a repost of a message I sent to the NARALO list last week entitled "The lost UA decade" after watching the NARALO UA Day activities. No edits have been made from the original.

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Hi all,

I have read a number of the emails and watched portions of all three of the recordings done for the UA Day. They are professionally done and content-rich.

But I must ask the participants... How effective is your message? It is now 10 years since the UASG was formed, and yet apparently UA Day still has to be done. The message of the last 10 years has been refined but its essence remains unchanged. And one may wonder if there will still be a need for UA Days in 2035.

In other emails I have described UA as an "orgy of futility". Here I will attempt to explain myself, and to suggest how the substantial talent involved in UA could more-effectively accomplish its objective.

UA is internationalization (abbreviated in geek world as i18n) through the lens of only two facets of the Internet: domain names and email addresses. As the Internet progresses these two functions are declining in importance as the world has discovered other uses that have filled in the accessibility gaps.

I spent two years working for UNHCR, bringing Internet connectivity to refugee camps. The ability to connect to others and access the Internet, these days, is now 100% a challenge of physical infrastructure and less of the ability to communicate once connected. Email isn't even known in many environments -- including Gen Z in the west -- bypassed in favour of chat platforms such as WhatsApp and WeChat which support full Unicode. Every phone for sale in the markets of the Dadaab camp came preloaded with Facebook and WhatsApp -- along with SMS-based mobile banking few people needed more, and their language of choice was easily accommodated by the platform (if not the keyboard, but UA isn't about hardware). Sometimes people use a browser, using internet searches rather than typing in URLs.

With users being able to perform Internet searches in their local script, does it matter to THEM if the search results go to a URL (often hidden anyways) that looks like digital nonsense? They typed in their search and clicked on the result. They got to where they needed, using the scripts they knew. Exactly what needs fixing?

As for email, its current paradigm is understandable if not fully convenient, and really is no different from the paradigm for postal mail which is more than 150 years old. The contents of your letter can be in any script you want, but the address on the envelope has to be written using a universal script so it can be processed by intermediaries. I'm really not sure that the substantial effort being used to address this will ever bear fruit, especially since email is increasingly limited to formal functions while casual conversations move to chat.

It is IMO quite disingenuous -- and a little arrogant -- to assert in 2025 that UA is at all about Internet accessibility. The billions who have access to physical connectivity today are having no problems talking to each other, using every script available in Unicode (including the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and the Cherokee Syllabary). They're just not using email or domain names.

The main impediment to accessibility is connectivity; were ICANN serious about accessibility issues it would be contributing to the enhancement of physical infrastructure.

I have been puzzled for years, wondering who is the intended target audience for the message of UA. All this talent, all this wisdom is being recorded to be seen and acted upon by ... whom?

Most Internet users are powerless to affect any of the technical infrastructure solutions necessary to support 8-bit Internet domains and email addresses worldwide. Awareness might be good, but no actual ability to enable UA exists amongst the masses.

It strikes me that there are only four entities who matter: Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo, the companies who (vastly) dominate email. Convince them through direct contact and the problem is solved thanks to their combined clout. This is a task that requires subtle diplomacy and lobbying, not public sessions broadcast to the void. (I find it ironic that "public" sessions to advance UA are password-protected -- why?)

Equally intriguing by this messaging is the path NOT taken; International Standards. Why has ICANN never (to my knowledge) advanced UA at the ISO? That body is ALL ABOUT international consistency. Its processes are slow and bureaucratic, but had a UA initiative started there in 2015 (supported by the GAC) it might have been implemented as a standard by now. Had ICANN gone the path of IETF the change -- and the standard -- would have come even quicker.

It may be too late to start that now. Much happens at Internet (and now AI) speed. By the time the ISO might create an IDN standard, email and domain names may have become legacy. The strategic blunder of not going the standards and quiet diplomacy path at the start may have doomed UA, in which case this year's UA day will be no more effective than last year's and no less effective than next year's.

It's your volunteer time. Spend it wisely. None of us is getting younger.