Summary

  • The Regional Commonwealth in the Field of Communications asked ICANN to convene a dedicated community process for national Universal Acceptance indicators designed for possible regular ITU use, separate from ICANN–UNESCO multilingualism measures.
  • ICANN's 28 September answer welcomed collaboration but named existing ccNSO, GAC, ITU and UNESCO channels. It did not announce that dedicated process or an agreed route by which any proposed indicator would become an ITU statistic.

One can test whether a form accepts an internationalized email address and still be unable to call the result a national statistic. Who selects the form? Which languages and scripts count? Does a public agency report its own systems, or does an external team reproduce the result? Most of all, which institution has standing to settle a method that countries can use repeatedly? The public letters between Alexey Borodin and Kurt Erik Lindqvist make this last question newly visible. They do not settle it.

Borodin, director general of the Regional Commonwealth in the Field of Communications (RCC), wrote on 3 September 2026; ICANN posted the letter on 21 September. He endorsed ICANN's earlier suggestion of measuring Universal Acceptance (UA) adoption, then proposed that ICANN start a dedicated community-based work process. Its product would be a coherent set of national-level indicators designed for the International Telecommunication Union's statistical environment: regular collection, consistent methods, international comparability and practical national application. The RCC specifically asked that this ITU-oriented framework be distinct from the ICANN–UNESCO work on multilingualism and UA. Related subjects do not automatically share a collection method or institutional purpose.

The sequence in the RCC letter is conditional. Community specialists would develop the indicators; an ICANN consultation and broad consensus would follow; only then could a set be proposed to the ITU for consideration and possible inclusion in its monitoring mechanisms. The RCC offered to bring regional statistical agencies, communications administrations and ITU experts into that discussion. Neither a finished indicator set nor an ITU decision is asserted in the request.

Lindqvist's answer, dated 28 September and published the next day, accepts the importance of cooperation but does not establish the new process Borodin requested. It encourages RCC members to contribute through the existing ccNSO Universal Acceptance Committee and the GAC working group on UA and internationalized domain names. It also points to ICANN's participation in ITU statistical discussions and its work with UNESCO. ICANN says it proposed UA indicators as a possible future topic for an ITU-D expert group in 2025 and jointly highlighted a foundational IDN indicator with UNESCO in another international review.

Those are avenues for engagement, not a statement that the ITU has adopted a country series. Nor is the reply a refusal to collaborate: it expressly welcomes RCC contributions.

The final UA Expert Working Group guidelines explain why both letters can sound constructive without yet defining a handoff. Guideline 44 asks for indicators that are clear, inexpensive to measure and explicit about who reports them. Guideline 45 ranges from awareness and policy support to implementation and capacity. Guideline 46 recommends that ICANN coordinate what lies within its remit and explore inclusion of UA indicators in global frameworks with intergovernmental organizations; Guideline 47 encourages self-reporting through existing channels.

The document is advisory, ICANN is reviewing how to prioritize it, and its measurement priority table singles out 44 and 45 rather than 46 and 47. Exploration is not authorization to collect a harmonized national series.

The news, then, is not a dispute about the value of UA or a contest between one dataset and another. It is a proposal for a purpose-built route meeting a response that prefers named existing corridors. Multiple corridors can be useful for participation, yet leave no single public answer to who convenes the method, who validates a national return and who decides whether the ITU will use it. A future announcement should be read for those decisions, not merely for a list of candidate metrics.

This is Daniel Kade's institutional reading of the correspondence; the letters themselves report no adopted framework, country ranking or measured improvement.

Sources