Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
Last week saw EURid hold the 10th annual .eu Web Awards ceremony in Brussels, honouring the most exceptional .eu websites of the year. An Italian digital marketing company, Web To Emotions Web Agency Rome, won the main prize of the evening.
Hope for Justice, a UK-based charity working to bring an end to modern slavery and human trafficking, and to protect the human rights of victims and survivors, won the main prize in the fifth annual .ORG Impact Awards from the people behind the .org top-level domain, Public Interest Registy.
Eleven European TLDs with support from the organisation representing 50 TLDs across Europe, CENTR, have launched the European top-level domain Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (EUR TLD ISAC). The Centre has the goal of strengthening cybersecurity capabilities and resilience among TLD operators across Europe as well as fostering collaboration.
Internationalised Domain Names may have failed to attract significant numbers of registrations, but they’re now offered by 84% (144) of all ccTLDs, with a further one in preparation to launch, according to the latest IDN World Report. But growth has been limited and awareness is still low.
Over the past couple of weeks Nominet, the .uk registry, has announced it will be funding Internet Matters to carry out research into the growing problem of self-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as well another programme to address the UK’s growing digital skills shortage and pull down the barriers many face trying to enter the rapidly-evolving workforce.
ICANN announced Thursday that Kigali, Rwanda, has been selected as the location for the ICANN80 Policy Forum, which will be held from 10 to 13 June 2024 at the Kigali Convention Centre. The last ICANN Public Meeting held in Africa was in June 2019.
The Gabonese government has taken back control of their .ga ccTLD from Freenom who have provided registry services for the past decade. ccTLDs managed by the Dutch backend registry provider Freenom are well known as havens for spammers and phishers, recently being sued by Facebook’s owner Meta for, as Krebs On Security reported, allegedly ignoring “abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.”
DENIC released their annual update on the distribution of .de domain names both within Germany and throughout the world this week for 2022. Overall there was little change from 2021. Domain registrations in the former West Germany remained above that of the former East, with the divide increasing slightly, Berlin remained the city with the most domain names, Osnabruck the city, the state of Hamburg, and several districts in Bavaria remained those with the most domain names per capita.
Registrants of .fr domain names, and those in the overseas territory ccTLDs the French registry Afnic manage, will have a new and free dispute mediation process available to them from 3 July.
ICANN this week announced the 2023 ICANN DNS Symposium (IDS) will be held online and in person on 5 September, in Da Nang, Vietnam as well as the Regional Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) Global Stakeholder Engagement team’s plans for 2023 Domain Names Week in Buenos Aires.