Hi Evan,

 

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and raise these important questions.

 

I appreciate your candor and the critical lens through which you’re approaching the challenges around Universal Acceptance. You bring up valid concerns—especially around messaging clarity, the need for impactful outreach beyond just awareness-building, and the importance of transparency when it comes to ICANN’s role.

 

While I agree that the landscape is evolving and users today engage with the Internet in ways that go far beyond domain names and email, I still believe that fostering cultural context in communication can play a supporting role—especially in regions where local script representation still intersects with identity and inclusion.

 

That said, your perspective on focusing energy toward infrastructure-level players and more strategic standards bodies is well taken. Perhaps there’s room to find balance—where broader community awareness supports (but doesn’t replace) deeper technical advocacy efforts.

 

Thanks again for adding to the dialogue. It’s a conversation worth having.

 

Best regards,

Mohibul



On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 3:34 PM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Mohibul,

Thanks for the response.

On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 2:47 PM Mohibul Mahmud <mohibul.mahmud@gmail.com> wrote:
 

 While I see your point on targeting the tech giants and standards bodies, I believe that community awareness still has value—especially when tailored with cultural context in mind.


This comment raises questions about its underlying assumptions:
  1. What is the objective of UA? Raising awareness or effecting a technical change of infrastructure?
    If it's to effect change, the current tactics are doomed to fail because, as I indicated, they're not reaching those who are capable of actually changing.
    If it's raising awareness, launching a number of videos, hidden on the ICANN website and password-protected, is not what I would call a way to reach the masses.
    Spending all this effort on a message and then locking it away like this guarantees you won't reach much of an audience.
    ICANN has a YouTube channel, why hasn't it been offered to UA Day? That would strike me as the LEAST that could be done, considering all the time invested.
    (I would also suggest that raising public awareness means videos that are less than two hours long...)

  2. Community awareness ... about exactly what?
    I'm not sure this has been well thought out. Beyond application to Internet resources, engaging in amateur anthropology seems out of scope.
    About what is the public unaware that UA exists to address? That domain names and email addresses don't yet work everywhere in every script? Why should people care if they're fully capable, currently using the Internet in every script available, to reach people and organizations of their choice? Chat systems that use phone numbers as personal identifiers don't touch domains or email addresses at all. So part of the job of awareness demands explaining why people should even care.

  3. And don't forget that you're promoting what can justifiably be seen as a massive conflict of interest. All of ICANN's revenue comes from rental of domain names, so the proliferation of IDNs is in ICANN's financial interest. Would ICANN care at all about things like international cultural sensitivity if it did not seek to expand revenue from non-Latin-script TLDs? If UA is seen as a just means to enable ICANN and its partners to sell more domains, that will certainly impede ... acceptance. If you don't believe this to be the case, that has to be part of the message.
Cheers,

Evan