ICANN’s meetings are starting to get back to normal with in-person attendances. In an announcement during the recent ICANN74 in The Hague, DENIC, eco and ICANN announced the ICANN78 annual general meeting will be held in Hamburg, Germany, in October 2023. And ICANN has scheduled the first Global Domains Division Summit since May 2020’s cancelled GDD Industry Summit in Paris for Los Angeles in November 2022.
The .berlin new gTLD has retained its position as the most successful Digital City Brand in 2021 according to the fifth edition of DOTZON’s Digital City Brands study.
With ICANN, like many other organisations, forced to move their meetings into the virtual space, there has been a lot of learning about what works, and doesn’t. About what people want. And don’t. So for ICANN69 there was a demand from the community for YouTube streaming, to which ICANN has acquiesced for a limited number of sessions. There have also been protections added to prevent malicious disruptions that have occurred in previous virtual meetings.
As expected, ICANN have announced the ICANN69 Annual General Meeting (AGM), which was to be held in Hamburg, Germany, will not proceed as an in-person meeting due to the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic. Instead, the Board has directed the ICANN org to coordinate with the ICANN community on the best way forward for ICANN69 to meet the expected outcomes of an ICANN AGM and support the community’s ongoing policy advice and development work, despite being unable to meet in person.
For the first time in 21 years, ICANN will hold a public meeting in Germany in October 2020 the global domain name overseer announced at its public meeting in Panama last week.
DENIC, the .de ccTLD registry, and eco, the German Association of the Internet Industry will be joint hosts of ICANNâs 69th public meeting to be held in Hamburg from 17 to 22 October 2020. The previous meeting held in Germany was ICANNâs second, held in Berlin in May 1999.
Back in 1999, the meeting details available on the ICANN website reflect an organisation in the making with issues much different from facing it today, although some remain the same such as budgetary issues. Back then issues discussed were the development of many of the committees and groups that are either still in existence today or were in their infancy and have evolved into other bodies.
âAfter Berlin in 1999, this is the first time in 20 years that we have brought an ICANN conference to Germany,â says Oliver Süme, Chair of the Board of eco â Association of the Internet Industry. âWith eco, DENIC, and the City of Hamburg, strong partners from industry and politics have joined to achieve this goal.â
âAn open, free, and secure Internet is a strategic priority for DENIC. The commitment of the German Internet Community has been honoured with the decision to bring the ICANN meeting to Hamburg. This will offer a good opportunity to put the German and European perspectives to the table at an even broader level,â says DENIC Board Member Dr. Jörg Schweiger. DENIC operates Germanyâs top-level domain .DE, which currently â with close to 16.3m domains under management â is the second-largest country-targeted namespace on the Internet.
Alongside the country-targeted ones, there are also generic domain suffixes, including â on offer for several years now â ones with a clear regional focus. The City of Hamburg actively supported the registration of the new top-level domain .hamburg, so that, for example, the Hamburg police website can now be reached at www.polizei.hamburg.
The organisers expect around 2,500 to 3,500 attendees to participate in this conference from academia, the tech community, politics, industry, and civil society: âHamburg is smart and innovative, and is therefore a suitable setting for such an important conference of the international Internet community,â says Hamburgâs Senator of Economic Affairs, Frank Horch.
The hosting partners had submitted their application to ICANN in November 2016, under the coordination of the Hamburg Convention Bureau.
A fire aboard a ship berthed in Hamburg, Germany, has impacted on preparations for the ICANN57 meeting to be held in Hyderabad, India, meeting. ICANN was shipping two containers of equipment from Helsinki, Finland, following ICANN56 and the ship they were aboard had a minor fire.The two containers – a 40-foot and a 20-foot container – were carrying all of the essential equipment required for the setup of each meeting such as microphones, monitors and cameras as well as miles of cable and hundreds of pieces of equipment providing connectivity, and enabling engagement and the seamless presentation of ICANN sessions.According to a post on the ICANN blog, the fire took 150 firefighters four days to extinguish. Reports indicated that welding in the cargo hold caused the incident.As a result, the smaller of the two containers has been detained in Hamburg due to its proximity to the fire. This container ICANN said held printers, remote participation computers, camera kits, digital signage equipment, and all network hardware and wireless equipment, including over 5 miles (8 km) of cabling. However due to maritime law, inspections by German authorities and the shipping company’s insurance adjusters could take several months to several years. This means that even if the equipment is undamaged, this container will not arrive in time for ICANN57.ICANN has put emergency contingency plans in place. There is a detailed inventory of the 27 cases in the container, and ICANN has begun replacing the equipment. As of 26 September, ICANN purchased all replacement equipment that is deemed to be critical for ICANN57.In this worst-case scenario, our equipment vendors have committed to us to provide the critical replacement equipment for ICANN57.However, ICANN has advised that two services will not be available as a result of the fire:
ICANN have published proposed amendments, which are being posted for comment, that would allow the registration of country and territory names at all levels in .EMERCK, .HAMBURG and .BERLIN TLDs.| Forum Announcement: | Comment Period Opens on | Date: | 2 March 2015 | ||||||||||||||||
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| Purpose (Brief): | Three (3) Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) requests were submitted by the registry operators listed below to allow the release of country and territory names for the below TLDs. In total, the requests concern 3 New gTLDs.
Currently, .EMERCK, .HAMBURG and .BERLIN Registry Agreements require country and territory names contained in specific internationally recognized lists to be withheld from registration or allocated to the registry operator at all levels. As required by the RSEP, ICANN has undertaken a preliminary determination on whether these RSEP proposals might raise significant competition, security or stability issues. ICANN‘s preliminary review (based on the information provided) did not identify any such issues. Following ICANN‘s preliminary determination that the proposals do not raise significant competition, security or stability issues, it was further determined that the change would require a material change to the respective Registry Agreements and that an amendment is needed in order to effect the change. The proposed amendments, which are being posted for comment, would allow the registration of country and territory names at all levels in .EMERCK, .HAMBURG and .BERLIN TLDs. It should be noted that as of 13 November 2014, Specification 13 is granted for .EMERCK, whereas Registry Agreements for .HAMBURG and .BERLIN do not include Specification 13 provisions in place and these two TLDs are Geo TLDs. |
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| Public Comment Box Link: | https://www.icann.org/public-comments/emerck-hamburg-berlin-amendment-2015-03-02-en | ||||||||||||||||||
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2015-03-02-en
Business is the main user of domain names said Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid on the first day of the annual Domain Pulse being held in Hamburg, Germany.In a survey involving eleven top level domains – with the results for most TLDs anonymous – EURid found that one quarter (26.5%) of domain names were used for business purposes. In the categories used for the survey, the second most common use was “error” with less than a quarter of domains (23.5%), which included the domain not being configured correctly or only used for email.One in five (20.6%) domains was being used for a holding page, 17.3 per cent for pay-per-click advertising and ten per cent for community groups or personal use. Somewhat surprisingly, only0.4 per cent of domains surveyed was used for hosting pornographic websites.The survey analysed 50,000 websites across 11 TLDs including the three original TLDS (.COM, .NET and .ORG), three ccTLDs among the EU’s ten largest, four new TLDs (.MOBI, .PRO, .BIZ and .INFO) as well as, naturally, .EU.There were also quite distinct differences in the use of domains registered for gTLDs and ccTLDs Wesemael noted. Domain names used for business purposes ranged from a high of 42.3 per cent for one of the ccTLDs, with the other two ccTLDs close behind, while the lowest was for the two new gTLDs, .MOBI and .PRO.Websites used for pay-per-click advertising purposes was highest among .COM (27.3%), .BIZ (27.7%) and .INFO (27.1%) while lowest for the four ccTLDs (4.5% to 12.8%) and .PRO (10.7%).And for not one of the TLDs surveyed did pornographic websites account for more than one per cent of domain names.It was interesting to know, as Wesemael explained, that the older gTLDs and ccTLDs had distinct usage profiles that when shown on charts was very distinctive, with older TLDS having a higher percentage of business websites, while ccTLDs have even more business websites than the gTLDs. And .EU had a higher than average use of domain names for business websites with 31.4 per cent of domain names used for business compared to the average of 26.5%. Wesemael says this shows .EU being used for business, and in particular cross-border business.The Domain Pulse conference continues Tuesday with live streaming coverage available here, with no translations available, so most presentations are in German.The EURid report, Website usage trends among top-level domains, is available for download here.
The 2012 Domain Pulse kicks off on Monday, this year being held in the German city of Hamburg. But don’t despair if you can’t make it. There will be a live webcast accessible from the home page. So while those attending will already have made up their minds too, for those not, you can still follow all the proceedings.The annual Domain Pulse conference rotates between Switzerland, Austria and Germany and is hosted by the registries in each country (SWITCH, nic.at and DENIC) and is one of the highlights of the domain name calendar with around 400 people attending each year.This year’s two-day conference will have presentations both dealing with domain names and also looking wider about how technology is impacting on our lives. All presentations are translated into English when in German, and into German when the presentation is in English.On the domain name front presentations will include “How Domains Are Being Used” by Marc Van Wesemael from EURid, a panel discussion looking at insights and outlooks on new top level domains, a look at the Eco Registrar Atlas (available here in German and English) by lawyer and eco member Thomas Rickert, a look at risks regarding domain names from a specialist lawyer in IT law as well as an update on news from the registries as the last discussion of the conference.There will also be presentations on internet governance, privacy, security, internet addiction while the keynote address is titled “The Internet as the Operating System of Society” by Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck, who is described as a mathematician and maverick.The agenda for the conference is online (available here in English and here in German). For additional information, check out the conference website here.
The Austrian registry nic.at appears to have been drinking plenty of Red Bull and grown wings to cover the German-language new gTLD market. It seems every announcement of a proposed new gTLD in the German-speaking countries is using registry services from nic.at.
Last week nic.at announced they have signed up .VERSICHERUNG (insurance) and .REISE (travel), two of the most lucrative search keywords in German and likely to be quite successful gTLDs.
âWe are delighted that nic.atâs wave of successes keeps on rolling with the contract awards for .versicherung and .reise,â said Richard Wein, CEO of nic.at. âThis is yet another demonstration that our expertise is valued and well-known among prospective applicants.â
The announcement follows hot on the heels of announcements in recent weeks that nic.at has signed up to provide registry services for .BERLIN and .HAMBURG using their Registry In A Box service that provides a scalable solution for registry services. And prior to this, in early May nic.at signed an agreement to provide registry services for the Bahraini ccTLD .BH.
ICANN approved its Applicant Guidebook and set an application window for three months commencing 12 January only two weeks ago at the commencement of their Singapore meeting. Following the board approval the corridors were full of wheeling and dealing with potential gTLD applicants and registries seeking to form partnerships in the days after the Applicant Guidebook approval.
âIn our industry trust, expertise and professionalism are particularly important – and all three are criteria and attributes that nic.at matches,â said Alexander Schwiersch, CEO of dotversicherung und dotreise GmbH commenting on why they chose nic.at to provide registry services.