Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
The Public Interest Registry (PIR) unveiled the finalists for the 2025 .ORG Impact Awards Tuesday and announced rapper, philanthropist and activist Common will host this year’s awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. in October that will recognise outstanding mission-driven individuals and organisations from around the world for their positive contributions to society.
Registrants of .org domain names have one more week to nominate for the 2025 edition of the .ORG Impact Awards, awards that recognise some of the best websites and organisations behind .org domain names.
ICANN published its tax returns for itself and its affiliate Public Technical Identifiers for the year ending 30 June 2024 this week. When combined with looking at the corresponding annual reports, they show soaring expenditures but income has plateaued. While ICANN attributes some of the increased expenditure to the upcoming new gTLD expansion, what does this mean for registries, registrars and registrants? Higher prices?
Andreas Musielak, currently Chief Operating Officer at DENIC, will be heading from Frankfurt to Salzburg mid-year to take on the role of Commercial Managing Director and CEO at nic.at, the Austrian registry announced Tuesday.
Public Interest Registry, the team behind .org, and the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation have partnered to make available tools to all domain name registries in the global battle against child sexual abuse material.
The agenda and venue for next edition of the Domain Pulse meeting, to be held in Vienna from 22 to 23 February, have now been released. And registration is now open.
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.
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.”
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.