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.
Amendments to the .ee domain name regulations, the registrar contract and the rules of the Domain Disputes Committee (DVK) will come into force on 1 July the Estonian Internet Foundation announced last week.
New .eu registrations jumped 15% in the first quarter of 2020 over the corresponding quarter in 2019 on the back of a 64% increase in registrations from Portugal and registrations related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to EURid’s Q1 2020 Progress Report released this week.
CENTR has taken a look at how COVID-19 has impacted on the DNS, or rather how domain names using terms relating to COVID-19 have fared. While the end result is not much, what they have missed is the impact of domain names being registered because of the global pandemic but don’t refer COVID-19 or related terms.
New Zealand’s Domain Name Commission (DNC) had their third victory in three appearances in their ongoing court battle with DomainTools, the latest being in March. DomainTools had appealed three claims, following losing their first appeal, but won only one, while the DNC won the remaining two, with consideration being given by the DNC to appeal the remaining claim. It is a battle over whether a top-level domain registry protect the privacy of their registrants. As Jordan Carter, InternetNZ’s CEO, told the Goldstein Report back in March 2019, “this test case will be significant for protecting the privacy rights of .nz registrants in the .nz domain name space and it is likely to have an impact on other ccTLDs and the wider industry.” It seems that the privacy rights of .nz registrants has been protected.
Continue reading .NZ Gets Another Victory In DomainTools Battle Over registrant Privacy Rights
Over 64,000 previously unregistered .PR domain names were released on Monday, Puerto Rico Top Level Domain has announced. The domains released are a mix of words and terms in Spanish and English as well as numerical strings.
Continue reading .PR Releases 64,000 Premium Domains
People are staying at home more now in many countries including the Netherlands, and as a result Dutch people and businesses have registered just over 85,000 .nl domain names since the restrictions came into force. According to the .nl registry, SIDN, that’s ten thousand up on the same period in 2019.
Continue reading SIDN Sees Unexpected Jump In .NL Registrations Due To COVID-19
Over half (53%) of all .de domain names were registered in three German states – North Rhine-Westphalia (22%), Bavaria (18%) and Baden-Württemberg (13%) – at the end of 2019, according to the latest statistical analysis of .de domain names by Germany’s ccTLD manager DENIC.
Continue reading Over Half .DE Domains Registered In Three States: DENIC
Canada’s ccTLD registry, CIRA, has made the internet a bit safer and more private this week with the launch of CIRA Canadian Shield – a free DNS firewall service that will provide online privacy and security to individuals and families across Canada.
Continue reading CIRA Provides Canadians With Free DNS Firewall To Enhance Security And Privacy
nic.at announced their sister company, ipcom, has signed up 3 more ccTLDs to their anycast network technology RcodeZero DNS taking the total of TLDs relying on the technology to at least 19. While the Slovenian Registry (ARNES) has been using RcodeZero for many years for their .si, they recently extended their contract. But both the Finnish (TRAFICOM) and Irish (IE Domain Registry) registries have recently signed up and implemented RcodeZero as their secondary DNS provider to strengthen their DNS infrastructure for the first time.
Citing the network’s reliability and performance, TRAFICOM uses the secondary anycast service for their half million domain names in the Finnish country code top-level domain (ccTLD).
“Traficom selects its DNS partners based on very high quality and security standards, and ipcom fulfills them. During these challenging times this is very important”, explains Juhani Juselius, Chief Specialist.
The Irish ccTLD .ie also recently signed up for the secondary anycast network RcodeZero DNS to ensure permanent availability at maximum speed for their 300,000 domains.
In addition to the new ccTLD customers, .si (ARNES) – a long term customer for many years – has also renewed their contract with ipcom.
“With the Anycast service provided by RcodeZero DNS we can increase stability and redundancy for our .si TLD DNS,” said Benjamin Zwitting, Chief Technical Officer at ARNES, explaining why they decided to continue their partnership with RcodeZero DNS.
Naturally nic.at was delighted their sister company was able to gain two new clients and add another.
“Gaining more and more European TLDs proves that we are an important anycast provider within the community,” said a very happy Richard Wein, CEO of nic.at and ipcom. “Our flexibility towards customer needs, our personal support provided by long term employees and our location in the heart of Europe, positions us as attractive provider for competitive anycast solutions. We are proud to deliver high levels of reliability, performance and maximum protection for a registry’s DNS infrastructure.”
Any why use a service such as ipcom’s RcodeZero DNS anycast technology? In their announcement, nic.at says there are benefits that can be achieved by using at least one additional secondary anycast provider. With over 30 years of experience as the .at registry, ipcom has expert knowledge that feeds directly into our anycast product development and can respond very quickly and flexibly. More than 19 registries (like .nl, .pt, .eu), with more than 15 million domains under management, rely on RcodeZero DNS. External name service monitoring proves that the RcodeZero DNS network with more than 20 nodes (for TLDs) is one of the most reliable anycast services and a trusted global provider – the perfect partner for everybody that is continuously striving for highest optimisation of its own DNS infrastructure to guarantee the highest security standards.
More information: www.rcodezero.at or by e-mail rcodezero@ipcom.at