The 2020 Nordic Domain Days has been postponed until further notice due to the COVID-19 situation. The fifth of the annual event for the Nordic domain name conferences was originally scheduled to be held in Stockholm in September, was postponed and now postponed indefinitely.
For British .eu registrants, and there are currently around 135,000 of them, if they hadn’t realised they were about to lose their domain names as a result of Brexit, a notice sent to them by the .eu registry EURid last week may have jolted them into action to do something as they will no longer be eligible to hold their .eu domain name as of 1 January 2020.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[news release] GoDaddy Inc., the company that empowers everyday entrepreneurs, yesterday announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SkyVerge, a leading WooCommerce product developer. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.