The XYZ Registry recently launched Sunrise periods for five recently acquired new gTLDs – .quest and four new gTLDs for the beauty industry – .Beauty, .Hair, .Skin and .Makeup. Registrations for trademark holders commenced 1 December while General Availability will commence on 2 March.
[news release] ICANN Friday announced the launch of an audit program aimed at reviewing how registrars are fulfilling their contractual obligations related to addressing reports of potentially abusive domains. This audit follows the 2019 audit program that included all active registry operators, with the objective of understanding how registries were fulfilling their contractual obligations relating to the performance of Security Threats Reporting.
CentralNic Group, the ever expanding London-based domain name and web services company, has announced its first foray into the French-speaking world with the acquisition of SafeBrands, a leading online brand protection software provider and corporate internet services provider.
Epik, domain name registrar and webhost to some of the most unsavoury right-wing platforms including a YouTube-clone that “chortles at the idea of slaughtering and then eating black infants”, and which has a documented history of working with websites that traffic in hate, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has given Parler a home after it left or was kicked off its previous registrar and its webhost booted it.
INRegistry is offering free .in Internationalised Domain Names in any of the 22 official Indian languages whenever a .in domain name is registered. Registrants will also get a free email address in the local language.
Brexit impacted all manner of life in Britain when the country left the European Union on 1 February 2020, and this included .eu domain names. As of 1 January Britons are ineligible to hold .eu domain names after the “Transition Period” came to an end on 31 December.
With the Brexit transition period set to end on 31 December, any remaining British registrants of .eu domain names are set to find their domains suspended as of 1 January unless they can transfer their contact details to an eligible registrant. Currently there are over 122,000 British registrants of .eu domain names.
[news release] The Anti-Phishing Working Group’s (APWG) new Phishing Activity Trends Report reveals a rise in reported phishing since March of 2020. In August and September of 2020, the APWG logged 200,000 phishing sites per month — with more than 500 separate brands attacked by phishers each month in the quarter.
The third quarter of 2020 closed with 370.7 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 0.6 million registrations, or 0.2 percent, for the quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief released this week. This compares to growth of 0.9 percent for the second and 1.2 percent for the first quarter of 2020. Over the 12 months to the end of September, registrations have grown by 10.8 million, or 3.0 percent.
Donuts dropped a bit of a bombshell on the domain name industry Thursday by announcing they were taking on the domain name registry business of Afilias, making it one of the largest providers of backend registry services for hundreds of ccTLDs, legacy gTLDs and new gTLDs.