TLD/Registrar Updates: Detecting Fake .BE Web Shops; Afnic Reappointed .FR Registry; .NL COVID Bump Stays; .PY Turns 30; .РФ Photo Contest and Swedish Regulator Ends .SE Supervision plus Tucows Buys UNR

DNS Belgium have published an interview with a student whose Master’s thesis was on detecting fake web shops in the .be domain with machine learning.

Continue reading “TLD/Registrar Updates: Detecting Fake .BE Web Shops; Afnic Reappointed .FR Registry; .NL COVID Bump Stays; .PY Turns 30; .РФ Photo Contest and Swedish Regulator Ends .SE Supervision plus Tucows Buys UNR”

TLD Roundup: SHOP Hits One Million, 3 More New gTLDs Terminated, New T&Cs For .RU and .РФ, CIRA Announces $1.25M in Grants and DNS Belgium Explains Cyber Security Coalition Involvement

The .shop new gTLD announced in mid-July it passed the one million registrations mark, one of only six new gTLD’s that has surpassed the milestone. Aimed at online businesses/ecommerce, it launched in late September 2016 and took 15 months to reach the half million milestone and just over 3.5 years to reach the million.

Continue reading “TLD Roundup: SHOP Hits One Million, 3 More New gTLDs Terminated, New T&Cs For .RU and .РФ, CIRA Announces $1.25M in Grants and DNS Belgium Explains Cyber Security Coalition Involvement”

ICANN: The Eastern European DNS Forum Comes to Moscow

Today [19 Nov], ICANN announced that the third Eastern European Domain Name System Forum (EEDNSF) will take place from 4-5 December 2018, in Moscow, Russia, following the success of the first edition in Kiev, Ukraine (2016), and the second one in Minsk, Belarus (2017). The event is jointly organized by ICANN and the Coordination Center for National Domains .RU/.РФ (cctld.ru)

Today [19 Nov], ICANN announced that the third Eastern European Domain Name System Forum (EEDNSF) will take place from 4-5 December 2018, in Moscow, Russia, following the success of the first edition in Kiev, Ukraine (2016), and the second one in Minsk, Belarus (2017). The event is jointly organized by ICANN and the Coordination Center for National Domains .RU/.РФ (cctld.ru).

This event is part of ICANN‘s regional outreach efforts to raise awareness on issues related to the Domain Name System (DNS), and collaborate with stakeholders on key areas. It comes as a continuation of the earlier engagement efforts to bring global discussions on the DNS to the regional level, and uncover the contexts surrounding the regional perspectives.

Sessions on the first day will cover technical topics. The second day will be devoted to policy-related discussions. The Forum’s topics include:

  • The current state and evolution of the Root Server System
  • Universal Acceptance
  • Internationalized Domain Names
  • Artificial Intelligence and the DNS
  • DNS abuse
  • Transborder legislative issues affecting the DNS

ICANN‘s Chief Technology Officer David Conrad, and Chief Security, Stability and Resiliency Officer John Crain will be at the event participating in discussions related to the evolution and security of the DNS, and the current challenges faced. Other regional and global actors of the DNS industry will also attend the forum, contributing to the sessions with their experiences and areas of expertise.

Register here and visit the EEDNSF website for more information. You can track the event on social media with the hashtag #EEDNSF.

Remote participation will be available for those interested in participating, but unable to attend in-person.

This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2018-11-19-en

.RU/.РФ Domains Registry Fee Increasing By 71% In July

RU Coordination Center logoThe registry fee for .RU and .РФ domain names is increasing to 120 rubles from the current 70 rubles, an increase of 71%, the registry, the Coordination Center for TLD RU, announced, the first increase in 10 years

RU Coordination Center logoThe registry fee for .RU and .РФ domain names is increasing to 120 rubles from the current 70 rubles, an increase of 71%, the registry, the Coordination Center for TLD RU, announced, the first increase in 10 years.

The increase applies to registration and renewals from 1 July and was approved at a meeting of the Council of the Coordination Center for TLD .ru/.рф on 27 February. This increase, the CCTLDRU says, comes as no surprise to most people who are involved in this market: there has been talk about the need to raise prices since 2012. The cost of domain name registration and renewal in the .RU domain has not changed since 2007. The cost of the domain name registration and renewal in .РФ in 2011 equalled the cost in the .RU.

There are currently 5.523 million .ru domains and 901,000 .рф domains under management.

A survey by the CCTLDRU found that there would not be any serious decrease in the number of registered domain names. The price increase will mostly affect small low-margin registrars that provide services to domain investors.

Council members from the registrar community said that the price increase would improve the working conditions of the registrars and contribute to holding major marketing programs to promote the Russian national domains .RU and .РФ, as well as modernizing the infrastructure and developing the registration system.

Andrei Vorobyov spoke about the control of prices set by registrars: “Together with the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies, we are launching a public control mechanism to monitor prices for domain names. It is very important to prevent our registrars, who have doubled retail prices in the past few years, from passing this negligible (as compared to the final price) increase to their clients.”

The council also approved the Regulation on the Stabilization Fund of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and decided to allocate part of the undistributed profits of the past years to its creation. The fund will create financial reserves for emergency situations that can affect the stable and safe operation of the Russian domain space. The council also discussed and approved decisions on other issues.

CENTR Monthly Roundup, .AU Consults, .RU Neutralises Domains And .CA Internet Forum

CENTR logoCENTR have published their monthly roundup on what members have been up to recently, a survey on member outages for maintenance, the growth in the full member zone that now has over 65 million domain names under management and an extract from the CENTR paper Fifth World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum

CENTR logoCENTR have published their monthly roundup on what members have been up to recently, a survey on member outages for maintenance, the growth in the full member zone that now has over 65 million domain names under management and an extract from the CENTR paper Fifth World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum.

The survey on system maintenance and disturbances among CENTR members was to identify industry standards for maintenance and disturbances, how frequently registries normally close down for maintenance and how long are systems down due to this? The results indicated that a high, if planned, frequency is less of an issue than the time a maintenance window takes.

Most respondents (89%) stated they operate their system and interface internally rather than to an outsourced third party.

The Roundup also looked at the median growth of full members with growth declining from 15.3 percent in 2009 to 9.1 percent in 2012. No doubt this is influence by the maturing domain name market for many CENTR members. Median renewals have increased slightly over this period, starting at 79.5 percent, declining slightly and are now at 81.5 percent.

CENTR Member Map

Down under, AusRegistry and the .au Domain Administration (auDA) have launched an online survey aimed at the broader Australian community, asking their opinions about the .au domain namespace.

The survey is the first of its kind in the .au namespace and is seeking 10,000 responses over three months to provide a baseline performance standard to measure against annually in future surveys.

A key element of the survey is an investigation into the domain name purchasing behaviour of Australian consumers. Anecdotal evidence suggests Australians exhibit a strong preference for .au domain names and trust it over other namespaces such as .com, .nz or .asia. The survey will also identify trends in .au domain name uptake using demographic data.

Another area of interest the survey will examine is the introduction of new generic Top-Level Domains later this year and what impact this might have on consumers and .au.

Travelling back to Europe, 244 malicious domain names in the .ru and .рф zones were neutralised in January with another ten still the delegation process.

The biggest share of detected malicious domains (80%) is accounted for by phishing resources, 12 percent is accounted for by the resources that spread malicious software. The least share falls on the domains through which botnets are being controlled (the networks of infected computers): there were only eight percent of such domain names.

Over in North America, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), the organisation that manages .ca, is kicking off its annual consultation with a feature event in Ottawa and an online forum, providing all Canadians with an equal voice to discuss the issues that impact the safe and fair use of the internet.

The Canadian Internet Forum (CIF) commenced on 28 February at the Ottawa Convention Centre. At the forum, CIRA brought together leading thinkers and experts to discuss a variety of Internet-related topics, including digital literacy, cyber-security and internet governance.

CcTLD Updates: .au, .cr, .id, .nl, .ru, .sg

Following the 2010 Names Policy Panel, auDA, the .au policy and regulatory body, has announced they will be implementing some of the Panel’s recommendations

Following the 2010 Names Policy Panel, auDA, the .au policy and regulatory body, has announced they will be implementing some of the Panel’s recommendations.

There are two main policy changes. One relates to domain monetisation in .com.au and .net.au, which sees the policy rules in effect “incorporated into the Domain Name Eligibility and Allocation Policy Rules for Open 2LDs at Schedules C (com.au) and E (net.au).”

The second relates to the little used .id.au 2LD, previously open only to individuals using their actual name or nickname. Now registrants will be able to register a domain name in the 2LD that relates to “a personal interest or hobby of the registrant.”

NIC Costa Rica announced that on 16 October 2012, the registries from Germany (.de), Brazil (.br) and Czech Republic (.cz) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NIC Costa Rica (.cr). In their announcement NIC Costa Rica notes “the agreements allows for mutually beneficial projects such as: promote the exchange of expertise, share best practices related to management, strategy and business models, work together on initiatives that can lead to more efficient processes among other projects.”

The registry for .id domain names (Indonesia) said there is a good chance the ccTLD will become the largest in south east Asia. According to a Tech In Asia report,  Indonesia’s 103,882 .id domains are still outnumbered by Singapore’s .sg and Malaysia’s .my domains, which have 144,591 and 206,663 registered domains respectively.” The ccTLD has seen a 62.5 percent increase in registration in 2012 with the registry, PANDI, forecasting a growth rate of up to 170 percent in 2013 which, if it happens, would mean there would be 300,000 more new .id domain names at the end of 2013.

The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and SIDN have jointly written to ICANN on the subject of last resort redelegation. The move is linked to contingency arrangements that the ministry and SIDN made in the 2008 Covenant on Safeguarding the .nl Domain, with a view to ensuring the continuity and stability of the .nl domain under all circumstances. The letter informs ICANN about the Covenant and about the contingency arrangements made at the national level, in case a last resort redelegation should ever be necessary.

On 19 December, 2012, the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ hosted a press conference on the “Russian Domain Space 2012: the bottom line”. The press conference looked at the achievement os 2012 and emerging future trends.

Issues covered were the stability of Russia’s TLDs, .ru and .рф, the growth in registrations of both TLDs to go past a combined total of five million, the safety of the DNS and DNSSEC and Russian applications for new gTLDs.

And the Coordination Center for TLD RU also announced the Russian Domains stats portal now enables to compare the domain zones in a highly visual mode. Compare Data will prove useful for web analysts, media and other Internet community members as well as for the members of the domain industry.

The Singaporean registry, SGNIC, announced that from 2 January 2013, all new businesses and companies registered with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) via its BizFile system on or after 5 October 2012, will save at least S$30 for the first year of registration for their first .sg domain name (ending with “.com.sg” or “.sg”).

In another SGNIC announcement, from 1 to 31 January 2013, a selected group of Premium Domain Names (“PDNs”) will be released for application at a base price ranging from $642 to $21,400 (including GST). If the name has multiple applications, it will be allocated to the applicant with the highest bid.

ccTLD Updates for .xxx, .pw, .ru, .fr, .nl, .ee, vn, .be, .no

“What has really happened as a result of .XXX?” one year on from its launch is the focus of an article on Xbiz

“What has really happened as a result of .XXX?” one year on from its launch is the focus of an article on Xbiz.

The article notes that “among other things, new sites have come to market, new companies have formed to capitalise on new opportunities in the adult space and a level of accountability and oversight added to an industry that has long shunned supervision of any sort — while the majority of trademark disputes have been swiftly resolved in favour of the legitimate rights holders.”

And it notes that ICM Registry’s Stuart Lawley claims .XXX “has comfortably exceeded the company’s sales expectations — based on the figures it communicated back in 2003 and 2004 in its original application to ICANN.” ICM also believes renewal rates will be high, even though the first anniversary is not quite here.

The .pw ccTLD is relaunching being branded as ‘the Professional Web, with the new registry opening up a 68-day sunrise programme as of 3 December. The sunrise offers some unique features aimed at reducing overhead for brand-owners.

A guest posting on DomainNameNews from Kate Moran of TM.Biz, .pw’s trademark validation agent, looked at trademark validation for .PW. Unsurprisingly the posting considers .pw a leader, saying “the .pw registry is proposing to protect not only exact matches, but also any domain containing the trademark, misspellings, abbreviations and language translations of the validated trademark. The trademark validation agent, TM.Biz is coupling these rules with automated searches of 70 trademark databases.”

On 4 December, the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ and the Technical Center of Internet generated DNSSEC keys for .RU, one of the two Russian national domains. A formal event signified the first phase of signing .RU with DNSSEC, with all works expected to be finalised by the end of December 2012.

The .FR registry, Afnic, has released their December 2012 Domain Name Industry. The latest report looks at the growth rate for IPV6-compatible .fr domain names. In the report Afnic focuses on the success rate of Syreli claims in relation to the age of the domain name. Everything suggests that rights-holders are reactive and quickly intervene to enforce their rights via the Syreli procedure. The full report is available from the Afnic website here.

SIDN, the .nl registry, has published their final report of the 2012 Domain Name Debate. The debate examined issues such as availability of registrant’s details from Whois and drop catching. To check out the final report, check out the SIDN website here.

The price to registrars of .ee domain names will be cut by 11.8 percent on 1 March 2013, which will see the price cut from €17 to €15. Maximum registration periods will also be extended with options of two and three years.

Registrations of .vn domain names hit225,970 in the third quarter of 2012 according to VNNIC’s white paper on Vietnam’s internet.

Alternative Dispute Resolution celebrated its tenth birthday on 12 December, the .be registry dns.be announced. To mark the occasion, Cepina (the Belgian Centre for Arbitration and Mediation) organised a symposium in conjunction with DNS.be.

Norid, the registry for .no domain names, is again receiving reports on a company who tries to force Norwegian companies to buy domain names. The service is said to be offered to protect a company name or brand.

The issue may be a proposal to register a domain name within other top level domains, such as .com or .as, or they may suggest to register the domain name in different spellings, for instance with and without a hyphen. The company who offers services like this, often tells a story about other actors interested in buying the domain name, and that they need a quick decision.

 

CENTR Releases European Domain Name Statistics Report

The latest CENTR Domain Wire Stat Report shows that Montenegro (.me), Serbia (.rs) and Slovakia (.sk) are the European countries with the highest market share of the local ccTLD with 99 percent, 90 percent and 87 percent respectively.

The latest CENTR Domain Wire Stat Report shows that Montenegro (.me), Serbia (.rs) and Slovakia (.sk) are the European countries with the highest market share of the local ccTLD with 99 percent, 90 percent and 87 percent respectively.This means that in Montenegro, 99 percent of all domain names registered in the country across all top level domains are .me domains.The biannual report covers a wide number of statistics for Europe, such as there are 61.7 million country code domain names registered in Europe which is around a quarter of the 245 or so million domain names registered globally.And the European ccTLD with the highest growth rate is .pt (Portugal), but this is largely because registration policies for the ccTLD were liberalised earlier this year. And across Europe, two in five (40%) domain names are registered by individuals, while the remaining three in five are registered for commercial purposes. Plus the average length of a domain name is 11.2 characters and the top three registrars account for 45 percent of all European registrations.The report includes a list of the top 20 ccTLDs globally, which is headed by .de (Germany) with, as of the end of September, had 15.2 million registrations. There followed .tk (Tokelau – 10.83m) and .uk (United Kingdom – 10.24m).Within the top 20 list, the highest growth (year on year) has been achieved by .cn (China) at around 26.6 percent, partly due to changes in registration requirements. Second was .co (Columbia) with an increase of 25.1 percent, then .ru (Russia – 16%) .fr (France – 16%) and .br (Brazil – 15%). The median growth of the top 20 ccTLDs year-on-year was 11.5 percent.And IDN ccTLDs make up around 0.40 percent of the roughly 245 million domain names registered around the world, with the largest being .рф – the IDN ccTLD for the Russian Federation – with around 840,000 registrations.To download the complete Domain Wire Stat Report, go to centr.org/news/statistics/12-03-2012/2462/domainwire-stat-report-available.

.РФ TLD Two Years Old!

RU Coordination Center logo[news release] Today on May 12, 2012 Russian Cyrillic ccTLD .РФ celebrates its second birthday. Two years ago domain .РФ became one of the first IDN-domains in the world on May 12, 2010 registers of root server of global domain addresses received an entry about Cyrillic domain .РФ and on November 11, 2010 domain started an open registration of domain names

RU Coordination Center logo[news release] Today on May 12, 2012 Russian Cyrillic ccTLD .РФ celebrates its second birthday. Two years ago domain .РФ became one of the first IDN-domains in the world on May 12, 2010 registers of root server of global domain addresses received an entry about Cyrillic domain .РФ and on November 11, 2010 domain started an open registration of domain names.

Within two years of its work domain .РФ became an unconditional leader among global IDN-domains and also took the 16th place among European ccTLDs. Currently it contains 797,325 of registered domain names.

The increase of delegated domain names in domain .РФ for the last year accounted for 14 %, the number of delegated domain names is 573, 948 or 72% of the total. 289, 056 (36%) domain names in domain .РФ place working websites (a year ago there were 20%). 88,038 (11%) of domain names are used for re-direct.

76% of domain names have been registered by individuals, 24% – by legal entities. The most widespread length of a domain name in domain .РФ – 9 symbols(as in domain .RU). Notably, on average a domain name in .РФ is longer than that in .RU (the average length: 11.1 symbols vs.9.4).

95.7% domain names in .РФ have been registered by Russians. Leaders by the number of registered names in .РФ are Moscow (259,116 names or 32,5%), Moscow region (70,172 names or 8,8%) and St. Petersburg (64,914 names or 8,1%).

“Domain .РФ reached a stable level of its growth. By the end of 2012 we expect that the number of domain names in domain .РФ will reach 1,000,000-says Director of the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ Andrey Kolesnikov. –“What is more important is not the growth itself but that the domain names in Russian are increasingly used by Russian companies, private users for placing their web-sites on them. Domain in the national language influenced the growth of the Internet in Russia. We thank all who support and develop national Cyrillic domain.

This Coordination Center for TLD RU news release was sourced from:
cctld.ru/en/news/news_detail.php?ID=3760.

Europe Registry logoTo register your .РФ domain name, check out Europe Registry here.

Non-Residents Now Permitted To Register .РФ Domains Among T&C Changes

[caption id="attachment_193" align="alignleft" width="281" caption="RU Coordination Center logo"]RU Coordination Center logo[/caption]

As of 11 November, people living outside Russia are permitted to register .РФ (.RF) domain names according to new terms and conditions published by the registry

RU Coordination Center logo
RU Coordination Center logo

As of 11 November, people living outside Russia are permitted to register .РФ (.RF) domain names according to new terms and conditions published by the registry.

The changes aim to enhance the security of the Russian domain space and cover regulation of the secondary market among other issues.

For more information including the revised terms and conditions, see cctld.ru/en/news/news_detail.php?ID=1989.

 

Europe Registry logo
Europe Registry logo

To register your .RU and .РФ domain names, check out Europe Registry here.