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ICANN cuts off money to UASG

Kevin Murphy, April 30, 2025, 17:04:46 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN is the stop funding and supporting the Universal Acceptance Working Group, an independent outside group tasked with making sure domain names work everywhere on the internet regardless of TLD or language.

With no money or staff support, Org has likely signed the death warrant for the UASG, but ICANN insists it’s not turning its back on UA as a general principle.

“With the focus changing to implementation work, ICANN will no longer provide funding or staff support to the UASG after June 2025,” ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist wrote in a blog post today.

I don’t believe ICANN has ever revealed publicly how much money it was giving the group, but it was clearly significant enough to warrant review at a time when ICANN is tightening its belt in the face of budget pressures.

Budgets published in previous years have put UASG’s spending at anywhere from $500,000 to $1.4 million a year.

The move probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. A close reading of a board resolution from ICANN 82 in March strongly suggests ICANN was gently breaking the news that it planned to wind down the group.

Lindqvist’s post and the resolution both point out that UASG’s founding charter, written in 2015, called for it to be a 10-year awareness-raising project, and that 10 years is now up.

Lindqvist said ICANN will create a UA Expert Working Group of “invited members and nominated representatives” from across the community to “provide guidance for ICANN’s work on UA adoption”.

While the UASG has been mainly focused on internationalized domain names and awareness-raising in parts of the world that might not track ICANN very closely, much of the hands-on work has been done by ICANN itself.

Last year, Twitter and Meta-owned platforms like Whatsapp updated their linkification code base to more effectively support UA, but that seems to have happened largely due to ICANN engineers battering on their doors.

ICANN has also taken to directly engaging with smaller open source projects, many of which develop libraries used in much larger platforms, to make sure they support the freshest TLDs, regardless of script.

Lindqvist said ICANN will to continue to support UA Day, a series of educational gatherings held around the world each year.

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