The PDF attachment, "NetMission (APAC Youth) ICANN Public Comment: Draft Guidelines for Advancing UA Adoption" should be considered as the submission to this Public Comment Proceeding, in lieu of completing this form.

Comment Summary

NetMission.Asia (APAC Youth) welcomes the opportunity to provide input on the February 2026 Draft Guidelines for Advancing Universal Acceptance (UA) Adoption. This report provides the shared view of young Internet users and professionals across the Asia-Pacific region, where the goal of a multilingual Internet has not yet been reached.

Our primary concern is that the Draft Guidelines, while comprehensive in intent, do not yet show the urgent structural changes needed to close the Universal Acceptance (UA) gap for Asia-Pacific communities. UA must move from being a voluntary best practice to becoming a required, measurable and accountable standard across the institutions and systems that ICANN can influence. Our comments and recommendations in the attachment are organised into four themes:

Training and Education (Guidelines 8–12, 17–18, 37)

Policy, Governance, and Metrics (Guidelines 31–32, 43)

Technical Infrastructure and Security (Guidelines 4, 8–9, 21)

Inclusion and Validation (Guidelines 1, 10, 27–30, 42–45)

Across all themes, we urge the Expert Working Group to sharpen the distinction between what ICANN can enforce within its remit and what it must catalyse through partnership with IETF, W3C, Unicode Consortium and governments. ICANN's greatest contribution to UA adoption is not technical standard-setting but the exercise of its convening authority, contractual leverage over the DNS ecosystem and leadership by internal example.

Overall, NetMission.Asia and the APAC youth community support the Draft Guidelines and encourage ICANN org to finalise them with a stronger emphasis on end-user outcomes, enforceable accountability and a clearly defined division of roles across the global Internet governance ecosystem.