With ICANN, like many other organisations, forced to move their meetings into the virtual space, there has been a lot of learning about what works, and doesn’t. About what people want. And don’t. So for ICANN69 there was a demand from the community for YouTube streaming, to which ICANN has acquiesced for a limited number of sessions. There have also been protections added to prevent malicious disruptions that have occurred in previous virtual meetings.
An interesting news observation. As possible antitrust investigations into four of the biggest tech companies are discussed, this week MarketWatch reported how “some big names in videogaming could speed up things” including Fortnite, which they note “is one of the initial conclusions of legal experts and developers following Epic Games Inc.’s lawsuits against Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google for booting Epic’s hit videogame Fortnite out of their app stores Thursday.”
Back in April it was announced GoDaddy was acquiring Neustar’s registry services, and this week it was announced in a blog post on the new GoDaddy Registry website the deal had closed.
New gTLDs reached an all-time high of 33,736,338 registrations on 8 May, but just two months later on 8 July registrations have dropped 582,873 to 33,153,465 according to statistics from nTLDstats. Registrations amongst the 1,188 new gTLDs that are currently delegated were largely stable from around December 2018 to September 2019, hovering around the 26 million mark. They then grew 7.5 million in the next 8 months until the current slide and today have slipped just below the 33 million mark.
[news release] .gay announced Friday that they have partnered with Atari and the Qutie App to help facilitate connection and celebrate LGBTQ communities across the globe! The .gay domain is currently in an extended sunrise phase, available only to trademark holders and brands.
Have you ever thought of getting your own new gTLD? Well, now’s your chance. XYZ Registry and Uniregistry, joint operators of the .cars, .car and .auto new gTLDs, are putting them up for auction.
The number of domain names registered around the world grew by 4.5 million in the first quarter of 2020, taking the total to 366.8 million, an increase of 1.2%. The increase was led by an increase in new gTLD registrations of 3.0 million or 10.3%, taking their total to 32.3 million according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
Google has announced a Sunrise period to its .meet new gTLD, but when the Sunrise and Trademark Claims periods finish, Google will be the sole registrant of all domain names.