The manager of the domain identifier of Galicia on the web organised this informative session in Coruña in collaboration with the Professional College of Computer Engineering of Galicia and the Official College of Telecommunication Engineers, as well as the UDC.

A Coruña, 28 March 2025 A more diverse, multicultural, multilingual and universally accessible internet. These are the objectives pursued by Universal Acceptance (UA), the set of technical requirements that ensure that all valid domain names and email addresses, regardless of their alphabet, language or character length, can be used equally by all applications, devices and systems connected to the internet, without restrictions or operational problems. These same objectives were the focus of the conference held this Friday at the Faculty of Communication Sciences in A Coruña, organised by PuntoGal, the entity that manages the domain that identifies the domain in the network, together with ICANN, the entity that internationally coordinates the domain name system and assigns the IP addresses of the internet, on World Universal Acceptance Day, which has been celebrated since 2023 to make these challenges visible.

The session, which also counted with the collaboration of the Professional College of Computer Engineering of Galicia and the Official College of Telecommunications Engineers, together with the University of A Coruña (UDC), opened with the words of the vice-dean of the Faculty of Communication Sciences, responsible for Students and Practices, Nereida Rodríguez Fernández, and the vice-president of PuntoGal, Camilo Regueiro, also in charge of the opening of the day. In his first speech, the dean of the Galician School of Computer Engineering, Fernando Suárez Lorenzo, appealed to the advances in rights that are being achieved in the field of technology, from digital literacy to net neutrality. ‘Universal Acceptance should also be a right with the same transcendence and the same weight and Galicia can be a reference, since we have our own domain and a very advanced ecosystem’, he valued, while his counterpart in the Galician School of Telecommunications Engineers, Julio Sánchez Agrelo, recalled the responsibility of the professional sectors linked to communication technologies to ‘educate our communities so that they make use of tools to facilitate digital inclusion’.

The first presentation of the day was given by Geraldo Ferreira, Technical Manager of the UA and Internationalized Domain Names programmes at ICANN, who considered multilingualism ‘the key to digital inclusion’. ‘We live in a multilingual world, but there is a big difference between people who speak a certain language and the content we have in each language on the internet. There is room for growth in content in different languages’, he said, bearing in mind that, according to him, English accounts for half of all content on the network and that 52% of people, mainly from Asia and Africa, are not yet in line. ‘A linguistically diverse internet helps to reduce the digital divide’, he said, and called on users to “exert pressure” and demand that their providers support internationalised email servers in order to make progress in this multilingualism, as there is “no formal obligation” on the part of the companies to have domains and emails in all languages and alphabets. ‘It’s a job of convincing, of working in a coordinated way’, he acknowledged, to highlight ICANN’s “effort” to achieve the collaboration of these large companies so that all applications and services work with internationalised emails and domains.

In the second intervention, the writer Xabier Alcalá, a doctorate in Computer Science and Telecommunications Engineering, developed a complete review of the different linguistic systems and languages around the world and the problems of their representation in computer systems, and offered an attempt at a solution through the inclusion of diacritical symbols for non-Latin spelling languages. ‘Electronic mail, as was traditional mail, is a means of representation and is asynchronous, going from the post office to the post office, which today are the servers. These are the ones who have to understand to be able to redirect’, he exemplified.

On the other hand, the computer engineer Iván Luis, member of the School of Computer Engineering, highlighted the role of Universal Acceptance to ‘remove the language barriers through domains and emails, which are the most influential when representing’ and called on users and communities to ‘claim ourselves, to return our names in full and in our language’. ‘Till now if you do not speak English online you have a problem. The prevalence of this language on the internet is enormous, but the number of native speakers is much lower. We have to take each other into account’, he said, to warn of “all the pending work to adapt the tools for programming and that these also serve to make programmes and software that solve these linguistic needs”.

The last presentation, before the cocktail, was given by Edita de Lorenzo, professor at the University of Vigo and secretary of the board of PuntoGal, who highlighted the importance of a day like this one tomorrow – which is part of ICANN’s programme to raise awareness of Universal Acceptance, with half a hundred activities scheduled on five continents between March and May – to bring to light a problem that affects many millions of people who are not even aware of this barrier. ‘We are a minority of communities that use the Latin spelling for our language and there are many other varieties that not only matter and are not only worth entering the internet, but we know that they are an example of how much we can lose’, she warned, pointing out that the lack of regulations and concrete policies to advance digital linguistic inclusion “has a lot to do with who it affects”.

About PuntoGal

PuntoGal is the managing entity of the Galician domain since 2014. Established in 2006, it carries out its work in three main areas: domain management, representation of Galicia in international network management bodies and corporate actions to support initiatives in the field of technology, network, language and culture. Today there are around 7,300 registered .gal domains.

About ICANN

ICANN is the acronym for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a non-profit, multilateral entity that organises the granting of domain names and IP addresses worldwide, dedicated to preserving the stability of the Internet through consensus-based processes.