Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
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.
Authorities in the U.S. and Europe arrested nearly 300 people, confiscated over $53 million, and seized a dark web marketplace as part of an international crackdown on drug trafficking that officials say was the largest operation of its kind.
On 1 November Aotearoa New Zealand’s ccTLD launched a brand new registry system for its 750,000 plus .nz domain names, using technology based on Canada’s CIRA Registry Platform, the infrastructure behind the .ca domain name. InternetNZ will continue to manage it and keep all the .nz-related data in Aotearoa New Zealand.
France, Italy and Spain are stepping up pressure on the European Commission to come up with legislation that ensures Big Tech firms partly finance telecoms infrastructure in the bloc, a document showed on Monday.
The number of .fr domain names grew 5.8% in 2021 to end the year with 3,882,448 to continue the ccTLD’s boost during the COVID pandemic, according to Afnic’s Report of .FR in 2021 released last week. This compares to 3,670,372 .fr domain names registered at the end of 2020 when growth was 7.0%. In pre-pandemic times, 2019, growth was 3.7%.
Catching up on what’s been happening at EURid is the focus of today’s post. Over the last three months EURid has released their 2021 fourth quarter report, released 48,000 .eu domain names that were previously registered to British registrants, announced Greek character .eu domain name registrations will be deleted (Greek character domains should be registered under .ευ), continued COVID-related domain checks for nefarious registrations to March with their APEWS, published the first annual report of the Dynamic Coalition on Data and Trust, published results of their 2021 Registrar Satisfaction Survey (positive), continued support of the Surfrider Foundation Europe, they currently have a vacancy open for Legal Counsel while the CEO position has closed and announced an additional verification method for providing evidence of a registrant’s identity. Phew!
French regulators on Thursday fined Google and Facebook a total of more than 200 million euros ($226 million) for not making it as easy for people to opt out of online tracking as it is for them to accept it.
DNS Belgium have published an interview with a student whose Master’s thesis was on detecting fake web shops in the .be domain with machine learning.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, the European Commission has asked EURid, the .eu registry, to continue monitoring new .eu domain name registrations using their APEWS – Advanced Prevention and Early Warning System – platform for Covid-related keywords until 31 December 2021. The initial measures for these checks were set in early April 2020 in order to protect end-users from possible misuse of domain names.
Around 3.6 million websites across 464,000 domain names were taken offline after a major fire at an OVHcloud data centre site in Strasbourg last week, Netcraft is reporting. Around 184,000 websites using 59,600 .fr domain names were impacted, around 1.9% of all .fr domain names.