Is improving, but has a long way to go — Universal Acceptance

Fresh Radix research shows some possible improvement, although IDNs are still a challenge.

I’ve written regarding the challenges of Universal Acceptance (UA) many times.

UA refers to all top level domains working with websites, email platforms, social media sites, etc.

It’s been over a decade since a flood of fresh top level domains entered the web, and it’s still an uphill battle to get many of these to work across all platforms.

Domain registry Radix recently tested 145 platforms across 16 categories, counting website builders, payment providers, email services, and social media management tools, to determine which types of domains were compatible with them.

It tested “fresh” three-character domains, longer top level domains, and internationalized domain names (IDNs) worked.

Here’s what the firm found:

1) 14 out of 16 platform categories showed full acceptance of fresh short and fresh long TLDs during user sign-ups.

2) Fresh short and fresh long TLDs achieved a combined acceptance rate of 98.6% across all platforms tested.

3) IDN-based email addresses had an average acceptance rate of just 39.3% across all platforms tested.

While there is no identical earlier study to compare this to, I’d say this is an improvement over the experience even just a few years ago.

Still, severe gaps still exist, particularly in the areas of IDNs and email.

It’s not easy to solve, either. It took ICANN until last year for its employees to be able to send and receive emails from IDN addresses.

You can learn more regarding Universal Acceptance in this podcast.