A web crawler for new gTLDs

ICANN IT has released a UA (Universal Acceptance) Web Crawler that’s been published on GitHub. The website explains that it is "a tool to find the UAC compliance factor of any website". In more simple words: a tool to help you ensure that your domain names and email addresses can be used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices and systems.

What does the crawler do?

I first thought that ICANN had created its own browser but found out that it had nothing to do with this so since I am not geek enough (sorry Don) to try the tool myself, I pasted this from the official website so you can feel free to give it a try yourself:

The UAC Crawler will enable companies and website owners to find out the complexity involved in making their web assets Universal Acceptance Compliant. The idea behind the UAC Crawler portal is that it will give a complexity score which will help nontechnical user base to get started with the UAC journey. The UAC Crawler will crawl the website and generate a list of all internal links - Each use of a link might need to be checked that it can handle UA. It will then generate a score based on how compliant the website links are. The score will be out of 10 and will be based on the following factors:

• Domain Unicode URL Compliance - Checks if all links are UA compliant. It checks for the HTML encoding of the page to verify if it is UTF compliant;

• Unicode Email Address Compliance - Checks if all email addresses are UA Compliant;

• Inactive URL Compliance - The tool also checks for inactive or dead links.

Check the full presentation here.

New gTLDs & Universal Acceptance

The Universal Acceptance working group at ICANN deals with new gTLD recognition.

The purpose of this group is (according to my understanding) to spread the word that the technical side of some companies and administrations need to do adjustments to be able to read new domain name extensions. Many French administrations, for example, just reject emails because they are not yet ready to receive emails with a new ending such as ".consulting" or ".photos". This is a common problem and the Universal Acceptance working group is there to discuss such questions and provide solutions. It is also offered to participate in this absolutely not exciting debate.

What is the Universal Acceptance?
Sometimes, you send an email and...it is rejected by the server receiving the email. The reason of this is that the "machine" does not recognize an email with a domain name extension ending in ".email", instead of ".com".

The same happens with some forms, when you fill in the URL (website) field and a message tells you that there is an error when you try to submit the form.

With the development of new gTLDs, these developments are becoming a necessity, and the UA working group offers its help to solve technical problems of this kind.

I just noticed that their website offers a quick guide, translated in most languages (even in French) so I strongly suggest a download.

The new gTLD info for Tuesday, April 5th

 Many new gTLD reports on this Tuesday: regional new gTLDs, company TLDs and the report for .BRAND Registry Nameshield to inform on French new gTLD extensions registration volumes.

1. Report - The weekly French new gTLD report by Nameshield;
2. Back-End Registry: stock goes up 8.33%;
3. Don't want to pay excessive renewal fee for a Premium domain name? Read this.  
4. Someone bought jet.ski for $12,000;
5. Infographic - Regional new gTLDs;
6. Update - New gTLDs related to Companies (weekly report);
7. Scathing Article on New gTLD’s;
8. Universal Acceptance - User Profile page not accepting new domain names;
9. More coming during the day.

The Nameshield Group: Registry, Corporate and Retail Registrar

Most recent Trademark Clearinghouse Sunrise Period announcements

Universal Acceptance is not just a technical question: the .CLUB example

Extract: If Universal Acceptance relies a lot on technology to accept new domain names, it also relies on consumers adoption.

As the moderator of an important group related to new gTLDs on LinkedIn, I often "catch" articles related to new gTLDs, to initiate a conversation. Catching an article requires to copy-paste a URL in the Title field of the discussion but it only worked with "old" domain name extensions such as ".com". It did not work with ".club" domain names until very recently and I had to generate ".com" URLs to redirect to the right article.

Read my complete article on CircleId.