Since 2013, the internet namespace has expanded to 1,000+ new top-level domains, like .NETWORK, .GOOGLE, .BIBLE, .中国 and many many more. This expansion is called the new generic top-level domain (gTLD) program, making it possible for domain names to use non-Latin characters like Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, and other language scripts; this is known as IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names.)

But, not all softwares are yet fully-compatible to work with all of the valid internet domain names today. "Universal Acceptance" describes the requirement for all internet connected systems to accept all domain names. When a software is fully-compatible, it'll earn the designation of being "UA-Ready."

To get all websites and apps everywhere upgraded to recognize these newly valid fully qualified domain names that have non-Latin characters and more than 3 characters to the right of the dot has 2 primary challenges, IMHO.

First is the task of raising awareness for the necessity of Universal Acceptance. The existence of new gTLDs has yet to become commonly recognized by the general public and likely unknown in the software developers' community. The solution to raise awareness is on-going marketing, communicating, educating, until one day, new gTLDs become a normal part of every day life for how people use the internet. But it's not enough to know what the internet specifications and requirements are.

Secondly, the implementation of the software updates' code base to become UA-Ready will differ from software to software. I believe what can accelerate this would be readily available resources and example code that makes it easy for developers to incorporate Universal Acceptance into their existing code, without hours upon hours of work. For instance, when someone comes up with a RegEx expression that is sufficiently robust to be UA-Ready, that'll be really helpful to a lot of developers.

This is a list of example emails that can be used to test if the email portion of your software is UA-Ready:

​​info1@ua-test.link
info2@ua-test.technology
info3@普遍接受-测试.top
info4@ua-test.世界
测试1@ua-test.link
测试5@普遍接受-测试.世界
دون@رسيل.السعودية

* This list of example emails are taken from Evaluation of Websites for Acceptance of a Variety of Email Addresses (UASG017), a study conducted by the UASG (Universal Acceptance Steering Group). Out of 749 websites tested, only 7% (54) were accepted all 7 types of emails.

Here's the code repositories I've found so far--(note: just using these may not get your code to be UA-Ready):

• ICANN's Universal Acceptance Toolkit for C#, C, Java, Perl, Python  (note: this code does a lookup over a live internet connection)
• NPM JavaScript package repository for email validation - isemail() - claims to support all domains

Your help would be most welcomed. Please add a comment with other useful coding resources for how to become UA-Ready.

Ed.Note: This blog post will be updated with developer resources that are quick and easy to implement, something like plug and play, so that upgrading websites and apps to be UA-Ready will be simple. Stay tuned.

Don Hollander (of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group) posted this helpful article on LinkedIn, excerpted here with underlined emphasis added:

Making New Internet Domains Work for Everyone

​... The expansion allows people to claim a domain name that best reflects their sense of identity.  While this expansion is critical in bringing the next billion people online and growing the global Internet economy, the incorporation of these new domains across the global Internet is not an entirely automatic process. CIOs, web administrators, application developers and others have an important role to play in making sure their applications are compatible with the evolved Internet infrastructure.

... Many organizations and business have not updated their systems to accommodate the new domains or, in other words, become Universal Acceptance (UA)-ready. As a result, many applications and Internet-connected devices and systems are unable to accept, validate, store, process or display all domain names. This causes problems for organizations and headaches for users because if the applications do not recognize or appropriately process the new domain names or email addresses that use these extensions, it will result in lost customers and a poor user experience.

... To address these issues and provide support, stakeholders and industry leaders such as Apple, GoDaddy, Google, ICANN, Microsoft and Verisign, created the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG). The UASG exists to help organizations ensure their systems are UA-ready and able to accept all domain names and email addresses in any valid script. 

... The UASG has developed helpful guides and resources which are available at https://uasg.tech/documents. Of particular note is the Quick Guide to Universal Acceptance (UASG005) as well as the Introduction to Universal Acceptance (UASG 007), a comprehensive technical document on Universal Acceptance and the key issues that developers and system architects need to know.

Read the full article >>

Ths white paper, Unleashing the Power of All Domains: The Social, Cultural and Economic Benefits of Universal Acceptance, published by the  Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) clearly shows the many benefits of Universal Acceptance, where all domain names work everywhere.

Here's 3 highlights from this article, Universal Acceptance of Internet Domain Names is a USD 9.8 Billion Opportunity, New Study Shows, about that study: