The Policy Brief marks a tangible outcome of enhanced UNESCO-ICANN partnership following the renewal of UNESCO-ICANN Cooperation Agreement. It serves as a pioneering knowledge and advocacy product, providing actionable recommendations to advance Universal Acceptance (UA) through policy development, public procurement, digital public services, capacity-building and awareness-raising.
The brief emphasizes that people engage with the world in their own languages, therefore the Internet must support them in those languages. Yet, many still cannot fully access information, services, education or opportunities online in their languages and scripts. When domain names and email addresses in local languages are not universally accepted, communities risk exclusion from the digital world. This is why ensuring full acceptance of multilingual domain names and email addresses is essential for digital inclusion.
The brief was launched at EuroDIG Extra Vol. 10, a pre-event to the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EURODig) 2026. The session brought together UNESCO, ICANN, as well as European and global stakeholders to discuss persistent gaps in the digital ecosystem, and identify practical actions to accelerate UA adoption across the region.
UA is essential for a fully enabled knowledge-based society and for bridging the digital divide. Having multilingual content online is not enough as people also need to be able to navigate to that content, to reach a website and to have the domain name in their own language. This requires effort from all the different stakeholders, including public sector, technical organizations, academia and civil society.
Theresa SwinehartICANN Senior Vice-President of Global Domains and Strategy
UNESCO contributes its normative leadership on cultural and linguistic diversity, human rights – especially freedom of expression and universal access to information – and inclusive digital transformation. The UNESCO-ICANN partnership bridges communities that too often work in silos – policymakers, technical actors and development stakeholders – and creates the conditions for more coherent and effective action.
Guilherme CanelaDirector of the Division for Digital Inclusion and Policies and Digital Transformation, UNESCO
Sarmad Hussain, the Senior Director of ICANN, underlined the challenge of Universal Acceptance: only 29% of the world’s 31.3 million email servers currently support internationalized email addresses, meaning billions of people still cannot use the Internet in their own language. He informed that ICANN’s New Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Program: 2026 Round allows for application of additional multilingual gTLDs, with an Applicant Support Program aimed at reducing cost barriers for communities around the world.
It thus requires a multistakeholder approach to achieve Universal Acceptance. Mr Hussain flagged the roles that different stakeholders may play, and a concrete framework through which progress on Universal Acceptance can be tracked and measured. The Policy Brief proposes a four-dimension approach spanning awareness, policy support, implementation and capacity building, giving governments and stakeholders a practical tool for measuring Universal Acceptance.
Xianhong Hu, Programme Specialist at UNESCO, while presenting the Policy Brief, highlighted the central message: achieving a multilingual and inclusive Internet faces interconnected challenges, and can only be fully achieved and implemented through a multistakeholder approach and broad participation.
She stressed that Universal Acceptance is not only a technical issue, but also reflects gaps in awareness, policy and capacity. Linking UA to UNESCO’s mandate to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image, she highlighted its importance for meaningful connectivity. Ms Hu also noted that Universal Acceptance is included as a monitoring metric in UNESCO’s 2003 Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace, and underscored its role in supporting Indigenous languages within the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032).
Universal Acceptance Day, an annual global awareness event co-supported by UNESCO and ICANN, has reached more than 23,000 people across 82 countries between 2023 and 2025, in 39 languages. ICANN’s UA Curriculum Integration Program is now offering universities worldwide a framework for integrating internationalization concepts into technical degrees.
The policy brief will be made available in all UN official languages, as well as in Portuguese, Kiswahili and Quechua. UNESCO and ICANN invite relevant stakeholders, including domain name registries and registrars, technical communities, academia, civil society organizations and language communities, to use the Brief as a reference and advocacy tool to advance Universal Acceptance in digital inclusion, multilingualism, access to information and Internet governance.
read more: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-and-icann-launch-joint-policy-brief-universal-acceptance?hub=701
