Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
ICANN published its tax returns for itself and its affiliate Public Technical Identifiers for the year ending 30 June 2024 this week. When combined with looking at the corresponding annual reports, they show soaring expenditures but income has plateaued. While ICANN attributes some of the increased expenditure to the upcoming new gTLD expansion, what does this mean for registries, registrars and registrants? Higher prices?
Andreas Musielak, currently Chief Operating Officer at DENIC, will be heading from Frankfurt to Salzburg mid-year to take on the role of Commercial Managing Director and CEO at nic.at, the Austrian registry announced Tuesday.
Public Interest Registry, the team behind .org, and the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation have partnered to make available tools to all domain name registries in the global battle against child sexual abuse material.
Last week saw EURid hold the 10th annual .eu Web Awards ceremony in Brussels, honouring the most exceptional .eu websites of the year. An Italian digital marketing company, Web To Emotions Web Agency Rome, won the main prize of the evening.
Eleven European TLDs with support from the organisation representing 50 TLDs across Europe, CENTR, have launched the European top-level domain Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (EUR TLD ISAC). The Centre has the goal of strengthening cybersecurity capabilities and resilience among TLD operators across Europe as well as fostering collaboration.
Internationalised Domain Names may have failed to attract significant numbers of registrations, but they’re now offered by 84% (144) of all ccTLDs, with a further one in preparation to launch, according to the latest IDN World Report. But growth has been limited and awareness is still low.
Over the past couple of weeks Nominet, the .uk registry, has announced it will be funding Internet Matters to carry out research into the growing problem of self-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as well another programme to address the UK’s growing digital skills shortage and pull down the barriers many face trying to enter the rapidly-evolving workforce.
The Gabonese government has taken back control of their .ga ccTLD from Freenom who have provided registry services for the past decade. ccTLDs managed by the Dutch backend registry provider Freenom are well known as havens for spammers and phishers, recently being sued by Facebook’s owner Meta for, as Krebs On Security reported, allegedly ignoring “abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.”
DENIC released their annual update on the distribution of .de domain names both within Germany and throughout the world this week for 2022. Overall there was little change from 2021. Domain registrations in the former West Germany remained above that of the former East, with the divide increasing slightly, Berlin remained the city with the most domain names, Osnabruck the city, the state of Hamburg, and several districts in Bavaria remained those with the most domain names per capita.
Registrants of .fr domain names, and those in the overseas territory ccTLDs the French registry Afnic manage, will have a new and free dispute mediation process available to them from 3 July.