It’s been six years since the first of the new gTLDs was introduced in early 2014. The first to launch was .shabaka (“network” in Arabic) in February quickly followed by 4 of Donuts’ new gTLDs while .club wasn’t far behind launching in May 2014. Since then .club has gone from strength to strength and today is the eighth largest with 1.369 million registrations, having peaked at just over 1.65 million in January, July and August 2019.
With autonomous driving, industrial automation, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual and Augmented Reality in 5G and the cloud era all upon us, demand for and use of internet protocol addresses is growing and evolving, and with this “foreseen evolution” IPv6 needs to be further combined with other technologies to generate ground-breaking “IPv6+” based networks.
ICANN is inviting the community to join the ICANN Board for its upcoming Special Board Meeting on 7 May 2020 from 18:30-19:30 UTC. This meeting will be directly followed by an informational webinar regarding the Board’s Fiscal Year 2020 operational priorities. The Board meeting agenda can be found here.
New .eu registrations jumped 15% in the first quarter of 2020 over the corresponding quarter in 2019 on the back of a 64% increase in registrations from Portugal and registrations related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to EURid’s Q1 2020 Progress Report released this week.
CENTR has taken a look at how COVID-19 has impacted on the DNS, or rather how domain names using terms relating to COVID-19 have fared. While the end result is not much, what they have missed is the impact of domain names being registered because of the global pandemic but don’t refer COVID-19 or related terms.
Registrations are now open for the ICANN68 Policy Forum scheduled for 22-25 June 2020. Originally to be held physically in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic it has now been held as a virtual meeting instead.
ICANN Thursday announced that its affiliate, Public Technical Identifiers (PTI), invites the community to engage with Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) staff and members of the PTI Board to discuss the development of its first comprehensive strategic plan.
New Zealand’s Domain Name Commission (DNC) had their third victory in three appearances in their ongoing court battle with DomainTools, the latest being in March. DomainTools had appealed three claims, following losing their first appeal, but won only one, while the DNC won the remaining two, with consideration being given by the DNC to appeal the remaining claim. It is a battle over whether a top-level domain registry protect the privacy of their registrants. As Jordan Carter, InternetNZ’s CEO, told the Goldstein Report back in March 2019, “this test case will be significant for protecting the privacy rights of .nz registrants in the .nz domain name space and it is likely to have an impact on other ccTLDs and the wider industry.” It seems that the privacy rights of .nz registrants has been protected.
Over 64,000 previously unregistered .PR domain names were released on Monday, Puerto Rico Top Level Domain has announced. The domains released are a mix of words and terms in Spanish and English as well as numerical strings.
People are staying at home more now in many countries including the Netherlands, and as a result Dutch people and businesses have registered just over 85,000 .nl domain names since the restrictions came into force. According to the .nl registry, SIDN, that’s ten thousand up on the same period in 2019.
