ICANN is seeking speakers for their next (virtual) for their pre-ICANN72 ccTLD News Sessions on 6 and 7 October. ccTLDs with a best practice, project solution or case study to share with the broader community or even a market development, or perhaps legal or operational news that is engaging, relevant and informative to other ccTLDs from across the world are requested to put their hands up and nominate themselves.
Centr has published their latest European ccTLD News. The May 2014 edition includes updates on:
To download the May edition, go to:
https://centr.org/news/05-30-2014/european-cctld-news-may-2014
[news release] ACTIVE 24, CESNET, CZ.NIC, Dial Telecom, Seznam.cz and Telefónica Czech Republic are the six companies that joined the new project called Secure VLAN. It is designed to help to cope with the DoS and DDoS attacks which are targeting the popular Internet services in the Czech Republic.
The Secure VLAN project has home to existence on the NIX.CZ platform as a reaction to massive DoS attacks of March 2013. By joining the project, these companies clearly indicate their intention to make Czech Internet safer for their customers. Currently, there are other companies preparing to join the project too.
âNaturally, for a significant number of companies connected to NIX.CZ it is their key Czech customers that matter the most. During attacks it becomes impossible for affected customers to connect to important Internet services. In an event of such an attack a company joined in the project has a possibility to maintain a connection through the Secure VLAN and provide access to services thanks to other companies joined in the Secure VLAN project and this is the basic idea of the project.â explains Martin Semrád, the director of the NIX.CZ Association.
A participation in the project is subject to a number of conditions set in the Terms which must be fulfilled by each company wishing to join the project. For example, the company must be connected to NIX.CZ for a certain time period prior to joining the project, it must be trustworthy and it has to actively participate at the Working groups.
âTo become a member of the Secure VLAN a company must have a first-rate level of technology. Potential participants must fulfil strict security conditions and they have to make adjustments of their networks, such as implement safety measures against IP spoofing, which is the most common method to hide the true origin of DoS attacks.â adds Adam Golecký, the technical director of the Czech peering node.
The Secure VLAN is governed by its members, who are fully independent from NIX.CZ and have a full autonomy in their decisions. The project started to emerge last year and the representatives of the NIX.CZ Association have been discussing it on a number of Working groups and meetings.
âI am firmly convinced that a membership in such a project will become vital for companies that provide connection for important services, these need to maintain an uninterrupted connection even in the most critical moments. For many this step will mean a financial investment which will however return in a bigger marketing potential due to the membership in such a project.â says Martin Semrád.
Following the 2010 Names Policy Panel, auDA, the .au policy and regulatory body, has announced they will be implementing some of the Panelâs recommendations.
There are two main policy changes. One relates to domain monetisation in .com.au and .net.au, which sees the policy rules in effect âincorporated into the Domain Name Eligibility and Allocation Policy Rules for Open 2LDs at Schedules C (com.au) and E (net.au).â
The second relates to the little used .id.au 2LD, previously open only to individuals using their actual name or nickname. Now registrants will be able to register a domain name in the 2LD that relates to âa personal interest or hobby of the registrant.â
NIC Costa Rica announced that on 16 October 2012, the registries from Germany (.de), Brazil (.br) and Czech Republic (.cz) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NIC Costa Rica (.cr). In their announcement NIC Costa Rica notes âthe agreements allows for mutually beneficial projects such as: promote the exchange of expertise, share best practices related to management, strategy and business models, work together on initiatives that can lead to more efficient processes among other projects.â
The registry for .id domain names (Indonesia) said there is a good chance the ccTLD will become the largest in south east Asia. According to a Tech In Asia report, Indonesiaâs 103,882 .id domains are still outnumbered by Singaporeâs .sg and Malaysiaâs .my domains, which have 144,591 and 206,663 registered domains respectively.â The ccTLD has seen a 62.5 percent increase in registration in 2012 with the registry, PANDI, forecasting a growth rate of up to 170 percent in 2013 which, if it happens, would mean there would be 300,000 more new .id domain names at the end of 2013.
The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and SIDN have jointly written to ICANN on the subject of last resort redelegation. The move is linked to contingency arrangements that the ministry and SIDN made in the 2008 Covenant on Safeguarding the .nl Domain, with a view to ensuring the continuity and stability of the .nl domain under all circumstances. The letter informs ICANN about the Covenant and about the contingency arrangements made at the national level, in case a last resort redelegation should ever be necessary.
On 19 December, 2012, the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ hosted a press conference on the “Russian Domain Space 2012: the bottom line”. The press conference looked at the achievement os 2012 and emerging future trends.
Issues covered were the stability of Russiaâs TLDs, .ru and .ÑÑ, the growth in registrations of both TLDs to go past a combined total of five million, the safety of the DNS and DNSSEC and Russian applications for new gTLDs.
And the Coordination Center for TLD RU also announced the Russian Domains stats portal now enables to compare the domain zones in a highly visual mode. Compare Data will prove useful for web analysts, media and other Internet community members as well as for the members of the domain industry.
The Singaporean registry, SGNIC, announced that from 2 January 2013, all new businesses and companies registered with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) via its BizFile system on or after 5 October 2012, will save at least S$30 for the first year of registration for their first .sg domain name (ending with “.com.sg” or “.sg”).
In another SGNIC announcement, from 1 to 31 January 2013, a selected group of Premium Domain Names (âPDNsâ) will be released for application at a base price ranging from $642 to $21,400 (including GST). If the name has multiple applications, it will be allocated to the applicant with the highest bid.
On 19 November at 17:24, the number of active .CZ (Czech Republic) domain names reached one million CZ. NIC Association announced.
Among the top-level domains of member states of the EU, the .CZ domain became the 12th âmillionaireâ and is among those with the fastest growth. Over 10,000 new domains are registered each month.This achievement was helped particularly by the introduction of the FRED registration system, which is 5 years old this October, and which made the registration process considerably faster and cheaper.
âThe importance of internet domains keeps growing. The primary reason for that is the development of the internet, which is increasingly becoming an integral part of our lives. And if you want people to find you quickly and easily on the internet, you need a good domain. A dedicated internet domain is now one of the basic tools of all organisations. Even individuals are recognising its benefits more and more. The importance of internet domains is also illustrated by the process, which has already started, of extending the domain space with more suffixes. In addition to domain names ending in .CZ, .COM or .EU, next year we may start encountering domain names with the name of a city or organisation after the last full stop,â says OndÅej Filip, Executive Director of the CZ.NIC Association. âI am glad that in the eyes of domain holders, .CZ remains a prestigious suffix, being by far the most widely used one both for business and personal websites in the Czech Republic. I believe that our active approach to domain security and providing other services for registrars and users also plays its part.â
According to the most recent statistics published by CZ.NIC this April, the share of domain names owned by individuals is gradually increasing, accounting for 58 per cent of .CZ domains today. Most holders have only a single domain; in 2011, the highest number of .CZ domains with one owner was 4,054.In terms of regional distribution, the largest number of holders comes from the Central Bohemian region; the Karlovy Vary region has the lowest representation.
The content analysis of 1,200 randomly selected websites in the .CZ domain shows that the highest percentage of them are company websites (41 per cent), followed by parked domains (19 per cent), e-shops, and non-functional websites (8 per cent). Personal websites account for 7 per cent of domains.
 ICANN staff publishes a printed meeting guide for each of its three annual public meetings. ICANN are reviewing this practice and want your feedback. If you attended ICANN 44 in Prague, they ask that you please fill out this short survey on how useful you find the printed guide. Could the same information be provided in other ways, such as through a PDF on the meetings website? Would that be preferable?
The survey contains seven questions, one broken into multiple parts so that we can evaluate your satisfaction with different components of the guide. ICANN thanks you for sharing your views with them.
View the ICANN 44 Meeting Guide [PDF, 4.32 MB]
Take the survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S8RJN7Z
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-3-13jul12-en.htm
On 23 June 2012 in Prague, the ICANN Board approved the FY13 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 5.11 MB] which was then posted to the ICANN Financials page on 26 June 2012. This document describes the planned core operations and project activities, aligned with the required funding, for the 2013 fiscal year. These funded project activities are based on ICANN‘s strategic priorities as documented in the adopted three year 2013-2015 Strategic Plan, and include input taken from comments and feedback received from the community on both the FY13 Budget Framework posted on 17 January 2012 and the draft Operating Plan and Budget posted on 1 May 2012.
Within the adopted Budget are the approved requests from the Supporting Organizations, Advisory Committees, and Stakeholder Groups. Those additional requests will be implemented in conjunction with the appropriate ICANN staff work and can be found on pages 68-69 in the adopted FY13 Operating Plan and Budget.
Throughout the year, up to date financial information, including the Board adopted FY13 Operating Plan and Budget, can be found on the ICANN Financial Information webpage.
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-13jul12-en.htm
After months of consultations, open public comment processes and discussion, the ICANN Board of Directors made several resolutions at its 23 June meeting. These included authorization of renewal of its agreement with Verisign for operation of .COM, adoption of ICANN‘s operating budget and plan for fiscal year 2013 and approval for delegation of a new internationalized country code top-level domain.
The proposed .COM renewal Registry Agreement significantly improves security and stability of the Internet by modernizing requirements in order to meet up-to-date stability and security standards such as support for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) and Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). DNSSEC is a security protocol developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to protect Internet users by incorporating public key cryptography into the domain name system to digitally “sign” data.
The Board also approved the operating plan and budget for the fiscal year beginning 1 July 2012. The US$82 million budget reflects operational plans for implementation of strategies developed through ICANN‘s planning process. Key priorities include execution of the IANA functions contract, implementation of the New gTLD Program and the stability and security of the domain name system.
Other Board actions included the approval for delegation of a new IDN ccTLD for Oman to the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, and implementation of two Accountability and Transparency Review Team recommendations related to Ombudsman and Nominating Committee activities. The Board also approved Beijing, China, as the location for ICANN‘s April 2013 Asia Pacific Meeting.
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-28jun12-en.htm
Universal acceptance of all top-level domains is an on-going initiative within ICANN. Our goal is to raise awareness among all Internet users about the diversity of domains on the Internet. In the 1980s and 1990s the number of TLDs was small and they all shared the same basic format â two-character ASCII ccTLDs or a handful of three-character ASCII gTLDs.
This standard format led software vendors and web site developers to build their programs making specific assumptions about what was considered a valid TLD. As long as the software recognized the TLDs, people were able to use them. In the past decade newer ASCII gTLDs longer than three characters were introduced, plus new domains written in various non-Latin scripts â known as Internationalized domain names (IDNs) â were added. In the not so distant future we will be seeing even more TLDs, including IDN TLDs, thanks to the new gTLD program and IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process. This is why ICANN is committed to raising awareness among Internet software developers so they can build their software to ensure compatibility with all domains, rather than relying on outdated assumptions.
During the ICANN meeting in Costa Rica we held a roundtable discussion on TLD Acceptance. A panel of experts shared their experiences with the issue. We heard many suggestions on how to better guide our efforts in raising awareness of this initiative from the experts as well as from the community.
At the upcoming ICANN meeting in Prague we will not have a session specific to this topic. Instead we are reaching out to groups such as The At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) and others in order to schedule times to talk with them about the initiative and how they can help raise awareness.
If you have any questions about this effort or would like to schedule a time during the Prague meeting to learn more about the initiative and how you can help raise awareness, please contact ICANN staff at tld-acceptance@icann.org.
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-31may12-en.htm
