NetMission.Asia (APAC Youth) provided collective input on the Draft Guidelines for Advancing Universal Acceptance (UA) Adoption, emphasizing that UA must move beyond a voluntary best practice toward a measurable, enforceable, and accountable global standard. The submission reflects youth perspectives across the Asia-Pacific region, where linguistic diversity and uneven digital readiness continue to expose significant gaps in Internet usability.
The NetMission submission is structured around the following four themes:
Training and Education
- Embedding UA into developer workflows (CI/CD systems), university curriculae, and open-source learning platforms
- Positioning youth as co-creators and UA ambassadors rather than passive awareness recipients
Policy, Governance, and Metrics
- Integrating UA compliance into public procurement and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) frameworks
- Developing script- and language-based metrics and independent UA scorecards for accountability
Technical Infrastructure and Security
- Strengthening registrar accreditation with UA compliance benchmarks
- Improving Email Address Internationalisation (EAI) implementation and cross-script interoperability
- Supporting secure multilingual systems across the DNS ecosystem
Inclusion and Validation
- Ensuring UA works in low-resource and rural environments (including 2G/3G contexts)
- Addressing real-world barriers in women-led digital platforms and marginalized communities
- Establishing youth-led validation networks to capture ground-truth usability data
Overall, the statement urges ICANN to leverage its contractual authority over the DNS ecosystem and its convening power across stakeholders to drive systemic UA adoption, while coordinating closely with bodies such as the IETF, W3C, and Unicode Consortium.
This submission also marks an important milestone for the NetMission.Asia (APAC Youth) community, as it represents a significant contribution to a global Internet governance public comment process. It was a deeply collaborative effort, bringing together diverse local perspectives across the region and transforming them into a unified, structured, and policy-relevant contribution. The process highlighted how youth voices from different linguistic and technical contexts can meaningfully shape global Internet governance discussions when given the opportunity to engage.
We are especially grateful to Edmon Chung, CEO, DotAsia Organisation and Co-Chair of the Universal Acceptance Expert Working Group (UA-EWG) for his invaluable mentorship throughout this journey. His guidance, iterative feedback, and support in refining both content and structure were instrumental in strengthening the final submission, particularly in the absence of a predefined public comment format. Read the full submission at:
https://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/proceeding/draft-guidelines-for-advancing-ua-adoption-23-02-2026/submissions/netmissionasia-nma-13-04-2026
The statement was prepared by the following NetMission.Asia contributors (alphabetical order by first name):
Manas Joshi (India)
Nawal Munir (Pakistan)
Rupam Barui (India)
Taruna Kaur Bamrah (India)
Vinayak Bharadwaz (India)