The third quarter of 2020 closed with 370.7 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 0.6 million registrations, or 0.2 percent, for the quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief released this week. This compares to growth of 0.9 percent for the second and 1.2 percent for the first quarter of 2020. Over the 12 months to the end of September, registrations have grown by 10.8 million, or 3.0 percent.
Donuts dropped a bit of a bombshell on the domain name industry Thursday by announcing they were taking on the domain name registry business of Afilias, making it one of the largest providers of backend registry services for hundreds of ccTLDs, legacy gTLDs and new gTLDs.
[news release] Public Interest Registry (PIR), the People behind .ORG, today named the finalists for the 2nd annual .ORG Impact Awards, which honor the remarkable organizations and individuals making the world a better place.
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.
.gay domain names became available on a first-come, first-served basis Wednesday with the official launch day and first day of General Availability.
Public Interest Registry’s General Counsel Brian Cimbolic has laid out a new two-step appeal process for their .org top-level domain under their Anti-Abuse Policy in a post on the registry blog. Under the new appeals process registrants who believe their .org domain names have been suspended unfairly can contact PIR and then appeal to a neutral third party. The goal is to help build confidence in a safer, stronger DNS.
[news release] Public Interest Registry (PIR), the people behind the .ORG domain name, has been selected by The Washington Business Journal as one of the Top 10 Best Places to Work for 2020. PIR was selected because of its culture of caring and respect, its deeply held mission, and its commitment to honoring its people.
The second quarter of 2020 saw global domain name registrations continue to rise, with an increase of 3.3 million, or 0.9%. This took total registrations around the world to 370.1 million as the global COVID-19 pandemic continued to wreak havoc.
An interesting news observation. As possible antitrust investigations into four of the biggest tech companies are discussed, this week MarketWatch reported how “some big names in videogaming could speed up things” including Fortnite, which they note “is one of the initial conclusions of legal experts and developers following Epic Games Inc.’s lawsuits against Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google for booting Epic’s hit videogame Fortnite out of their app stores Thursday.”
