NCC wants Nigerian websites to adopt universal acceptance – Innovation Village

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has intensified its national campaign urging operators of Nigerian websites, enterprise software, and digital public platforms to adopt Universal Acceptance (UA) standards to foster an inclusive and multilingual internet ecosystem.

The Commission made the call  at a Universal Acceptance Workshop organised in Lagos in partnership with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Upperlink, the representatives of the telecommunications regulator emphasized that technical non-compliance in web infrastructure continues to shut millions of citizens out of the expanding digital economy.

Bridging the Linguistic and Technical Divide

Universal Acceptance is a foundational technical standard established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It dictates that all valid domain names and email addresses regardless of length, script, language, or top-level extension (such as .ng, .africa, or Internationalized Domain Names in local scripts) must be accepted, validated, processed, stored, and displayed seamlessly by every internet-enabled application.

While the internet was historically built around standard ASCII Latin characters, the expansion of global top-level domains and non-Latin character sets has created compatibility gaps. In a linguistically rich nation like Nigeria, legacy digital infrastructure often rejects non-traditional email structures or domain names written in indigenous or regional scripts, effectively creating digital barriers, Opeolu Oyebanji, Head of the Internet Infrastructure Unit within the NCC’s Cyber Security and Internet Governance Department, highlighted the urgency of system-wide upgrades.

“For a diverse country such as Nigeria with many languages, Universal Acceptance…