Universal Acceptance (UA) is the ability for applications & infrastructure to support internationalized domain names and email addresses (IDN) and TLDs of various lengths and types. The BC has long supported UA initiatives to give business users and registrants the availability of domain names and email addresses in a variety of scripts and languages.  

The roadmap provides testing methodology and results overview of two registry and one registrar system on their readiness from the UA perspective.  The document is aimed at technical managers and teams handling such systems.

From the BC perspective, what is more important is the timelines on when the registries and the registrars will test, upgrade their systems to handle IDNs, and provide those results to the public. 

In that regard, we have two suggestions:

1. Break down the UA readiness testing plan into categories of completion.  If a registrar completes these 5 tests they can be classified as 60% ready, if they complete another 5 then 80% ready, and if they clear these additional 5 then they are classified as 100% ready. A similar provision can also be made for Registries.

 2. Add provisions for SSAD/SSAD Light/Whois Disclosure System as part of the testing framework. The document currently contains test cases only for Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), WHOIS and Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) . Given that ICANN Org is working on SSAD/SSAD Light/Whois Disclosure System, there should be a test plan anticipated for universal acceptance of domain names and email addresses. it will be helpful to have this case in the document, even if only as a placeholder, so that test cases are developed when SSAD technical details become available.

This comment was drafted by Vivek Goyal, with help from Olajide Segunfunmi.

It was approved in accord with the BC Charter.

The BC supports the Roadmap, with two further suggestions for testing plans.