From none in February, second level, or direct, .au registrations have taken off, reaching 716,278 as of 31 December 2022, or 17.2% of all .au domain names. The figures were part of auDA’s latest Quarterly Report for the fourth quarter of 2022.
There was a slight decrease in .ie registrations in 2022 of 0.3%, taking total registrations to 329,265 domain names in the .ie database at the end of the year across the island of Ireland, including both the Republic and the North.
EURid’s stable of domain names, .eu, .ею and .ευ, are suffering some post-COVID pandemic blues. Over the last three years registrations for EURid’s three top-level domains jumped 95,953. But it’s a story of a pandemic bump, where many TLDs saw a jump in registrations as businesses that weren’t online went online, along with new ventures for existing businesses, and a slight decline following.
The long overdue launch of .au second level domains has been a success to date with over 700,000 registered as of the end of November 2022. And even retired Australian cricketers are getting in on the act. Listening to the ABC Radio cricket commentary today during coverage of the Australia v South Africa test match, former Australian players Shane Watson and Glenn McGrath were discussing Watson’s self-published book Winning the Inner Battle where Watson made reference to it only being available from shanewatson.au. Watson also has the .com.au domain, but it redirects to the .au.
Global domain name registrations have hovered around the 350 million market for the past three quarters, according to Verisign’s recent Domain Name Industry Briefs. The past three quarterly Briefs have seen total domain name registrations of 350.5 million (end Q1, 2022), 351.5 million (Q2, 2022) and in the most recent, 349.9 million (Q3, 2022).
EURid honoured the best of .eu, .ею and .ευ websites this week with a glittering event to celebrate the 2022 .eu Web Awards. Six categories were honoured at the event held in Mechelen, Belgium.
Tuvalu and GoDaddy Registry have relaunched a rebranded .TV 7.5 months after signing a contract that saw GoDaddy become the ccTLD’s new registry operator. Today .TV is billed “as the online home for content creators the world over” with the strapline “Turn on .TV”.
EURid, best known for .eu, has increased total registrations for its three top-level domains by a total of 15,000 in the year to the end of September, according to the registry’s latest Quarterly Report.
ICANN has appointed Nitin Wali, a 25-year veteran of the technology industry, as the Senior Director of Stakeholder Engagement for the South Asia region, covering Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka. For the last 18 months Wali has been Regional Director for GoDaddy Registry.
For businesses, monitoring for abusive behaviour, including malicious activities such as phishing, botnets and malware, is important in protecting their brand. One company to expand their offerings in this area recently was iQ Global who launched their iQ Abuse Scan to detect such abuse.