Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
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.
ICANN this week announced the 2023 ICANN DNS Symposium (IDS) will be held online and in person on 5 September, in Da Nang, Vietnam as well as the Regional Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) Global Stakeholder Engagement team’s plans for 2023 Domain Names Week in Buenos Aires.
Squarespace announced it has acquired the Google Domains business, which will be wound down following a transition period. This purchase includes approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers. Squarespace was already a reseller for Google’s registrar business and will allow them to provide a more integrated service to their customers, encouraging a wider number of customers to utilise Squarespace’s web building and ecommerce services.