As part of the European Digital Strategy, the European Commission announced in June a Digital Services Act package to strengthen the Single Market for digital services and foster innovation and competitiveness of the European online environment. The revised package will “impact network operators, cloud and hosting providers, top-level domain registries and registrars”, among others.
In tune with meetings and conferences around the world, InternetNZ’s annual NetHui is going virtual, a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, even though New Zealand has been less affected than most other countries. Safety first.
In cooperation with the Youth IGF, EURid, the .eu registry, has set up a Youth Committee that will advise the registry on Internet governance matters as well as on the promotion of the .eu top-level domain and its variants in other scripts.
Monday, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Naming Function Review Team (IFRT) has announced that it is in the final stages of completing its Initial Report. The IFRT will be holding a webinar for the community regarding one of their proposed recommendations that would require an amendment to the IANA Naming Functions Contract between ICANN and its affiliate Public Technical Identifiers (PTI). This amendment may be of particular interest to country code top-level domain (ccTLD) and generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry operators.
Webcentral, whose best known brand is Melbourne IT, has recommended shareholders accept a late bid from Australian telecommunications carrier 5G Networks rather than a revised bid from Web.com.
.gay domain names became available on a first-come, first-served basis Wednesday with the official launch day and first day of General Availability.
ICANN will continue its suspension of face-to-face meetings and business travel until at least 31 December 2020 with the organisation’s staff continuing to work from home, Göran Marby, ICANN’s President and CEO, announced in a post on the ICANN blog Tuesday. This includes ICANN69, from 17 to 22 October, also the 22nd Annual General Meeting, which was to be held in Hamburg, Germany. This follows June’s announcement that ICANN69 would be held virtually, as have the two previous ICANN meetings in 2020.
Do you need to include keywords in your domain name? The answer is no. That’s according to Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller who addressed the issue in a recent Google Webmasters where Mueller was specifically asked “Does a .jobs domain help rank for ‘jobs’?” Mueller says it’s more important to build up a website with quality content than focus on a domain name with a keyword.
There has been a late bid for the Webcentral Group (which includes Melbourne IT) by 5G Networks, an Australian telecommunications carrier. But this has spurred the original bidder, Web.com, into substantially upping their original bid.
South Africa’s ccTLD registry ZACR (ZA Central Registry) has announced the introduction of a Registry Lock as a means of better protecting registrants from domain name theft. And ZADNA announced last week they will be increasing the registry fee for .za domain names on 1 April 2021.