This week Australia’s Internet Governance Forum event, NetThing, is happening virtually with a host of discussions and presentations covering Australia’s critical infrastructure, internet standards, vaccine passports and digital rights, the internet as an essential service, tech and environmental sustainability, misinformation and disinformation, DNS abuse, trusted digital platforms, blockchain, protecting at risk voices, will technology save the planet, adult content online and mass surveillance and democracy. The theme for the 2021 NetThing Forum is “Building Bridges.”
Abu Dhabi, the capital and second-most populous city of the United Arab Emirates, has launched it’s very own new gTLD – .abudhabi. It is now considered to be the official domain name of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
It only took six years from one of those now defunct policy advisory groups, a Names Policy Panel, recommended it, but auDA has finally gotten around to announcing a definitive launch of second level .au domain names. They’re coming in March 2022.
Verisign ended the second quarter of 2021 with 170.6 million .com and .net domain name registrations in the domain name base, a 5.2% increase in 12 months, and a net increase of 2.59 million during the second quarter of 2021, according to the company’s second quarter 201 results.
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.
Webcentral Group have offloaded its 50% share in the Australian registrar, aftermarket outlet and drop catcher NetAlliance, whose best-known brand is drop catcher and aftermarket outlet NetFleet, for A$500,000 (US$345,000) in cash to David Warmuz’s Trellian.
auDA have confirmed Notices of Breach have been issued to the NetAlliance group of registrars – NetAlliance, NetAlliance Domain No 1 And Ziphosting – whose best known brand is NetFleet, for failing to meet the Accreditation Criteria outlined in their respective Registrar Agreements. I broke this story in late October when sources told me the breach notice was originally issued, however auDA is only claiming they issued the breach last week. I also believe there has been action taken in Australia’s Federal Court recently by various parties involved in this saga.
A breach notice is believed to have been issued by the Australian domain name regulator auDA to a local registrar with many thousands of domain names under management impacted. It even has the potential to indirectly impact the recent 5GN takeover of Webcentral, according to rumours swirling around the Australian domain name industry this week. The reasons for the breach notice are unknown, but it needs to be complied with urgently, possibly as soon as Friday this week.
A couple of reports from the people behind .nz have shown the impact of COVID-19 (coronavirus) on New Zealanders and their internet use in recent months. Statistics for .nz shows increased DNS activity, including a surge in registrations that has taken registrations to close to 715,000.
