(Reported by Louise Marie Hurel)

Representatives and fellows from the European ISOC Chapters met in Bucharest, Romania (full agenda here) from 9-10 May 2019. The two-day discussions covered topics such as encryption, Internet consolidation, IoT, Internet of food, and stimulated an inclusive and dynamic exchange on Internet Society’s 2025 long-term strategic planning. 

It is important to note that the European Chapters meeting was held right after two significant events in the region, the Consumers International Summit (Portugal) and SEEDIG (Romania), both of which played a fundamental role to advancing the regional discussions on cross-pollination between ISOC’s work on Trust by Design and Consumer Rights.… Read more ...

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) which has been working to facilitate that all domain names and corresponding email addresses work in all applications, has asked for this community’s help to voluntarily spread the word about Universal Acceptance. The Group includes Apple, Google, ICANN and Microsoft.

So what is “Universal Acceptance”?

• Since 2010, non-Latin characters, Top-Level Domains (TLDs) longer than 3 characters (e.g. .ASIA, .онлайн, etc.) and corresponding email addresses (e.g. иван.сергеев@пример.рф, etc.) were introduced.
  • This is significant because it allows the creation of gTLDs in non-Latin scripts including Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Tamil, and many others, meaning that native speakers of those languages will be able to use the Internet entirely in their language for the first time.