For British .eu registrants, and there are currently around 135,000 of them, if they hadn’t realised they were about to lose their domain names as a result of Brexit, a notice sent to them by the .eu registry EURid last week may have jolted them into action to do something as they will no longer be eligible to hold their .eu domain name as of 1 January 2020.
As Canadian businesses pivot to digital amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is working with Digital Main Street and Google Canada to offer .CA domain names to the thousands of Canadian small businesses accessing the ShopHERE powered by Google programme.
In tune with meetings and conferences around the world, InternetNZ’s annual NetHui is going virtual, a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, even though New Zealand has been less affected than most other countries. Safety first.
In cooperation with the Youth IGF, EURid, the .eu registry, has set up a Youth Committee that will advise the registry on Internet governance matters as well as on the promotion of the .eu top-level domain and its variants in other scripts.
Monday, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Naming Function Review Team (IFRT) has announced that it is in the final stages of completing its Initial Report. The IFRT will be holding a webinar for the community regarding one of their proposed recommendations that would require an amendment to the IANA Naming Functions Contract between ICANN and its affiliate Public Technical Identifiers (PTI). This amendment may be of particular interest to country code top-level domain (ccTLD) and generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry operators.
South Africa’s ccTLD registry ZACR (ZA Central Registry) has announced the introduction of a Registry Lock as a means of better protecting registrants from domain name theft. And ZADNA announced last week they will be increasing the registry fee for .za domain names on 1 April 2021.
InternetNZ announced today Medical IT Advisors’ Health Threat Intelligence feed is now integrated with its security product, Defenz DNS Firewall.
CIRA has brought back the .CA Domain Squad, and once again they’re determined to help Canadian businesses succeed online. The .CA Domain Squad made its debut last year and was a comical attempt to get Canadians to register more .ca domain names. The latest advertising campaign has its broadcast debut with four commercials on 14 September.
From 31 August to 15 December 2020, the Restena Foundation has announced they will be progressively opening the registration of more than 2,800 one and two character .lu domain names.
A study has popped up on the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review that looks at the reliability of information hosted on ccTLD domain names regarding the current COVID-19 pandemic. In the abstract, authors Nathanael Tombs from Solarisbank AG, Germany and Eleonore Fournier-Tombs from the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, Canada say “there is no reliable mechanism to verify these websites’ authenticity, and the space is also shared by commercial entities selling related (or not) products and advertisements.”
“This loophole” they say “is an urgent information security and misinformation problem that can be resolved by registering websites under restricted second-level domains or adopting existing methods of domain registrant identification.”
Continue reading Study Looks At COVID-19 Misinformation on ccTLD Domains