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?
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.
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.
If you’re wanting to know more about Universal Acceptance, ICANN is holding a second round of their “ICANN for Beginners: Universal Acceptance” (UA) webinars on 12 and 13 July 2023.
The second of the two big global domain name registration reports, the quarterly CENTRstats Global TLD Report for Q4 2022, came out recently with its usual focus on its member European ccTLDs and how domain names across the continent are used. The other major report from Verisign, which I wrote on earlier this week, focusses on total domain registrations around the world. With 52 full and 8 associate members, CENTR’s members are responsible for over 70% of all registered country code top-level domain names worldwide, and 57% of the European domain name market, ccTLDs and gTLDs combined. .com, which accounts for 45.6% of all domain names registered globally, accounts for only a third (32%) in Europe while other gTLDs account for the remaining 11%.
The total number of domain names registered around the world increased incrementally in the first quarter of 2023, growing 1.0% or 3.5 million, which coincidentally was the same 1.0% and 3.5 million increase for the 12 months to the end of March, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
Global domain name registrations have hovered around the 350 million market for the past three quarters, according to Verisign’s recent Domain Name Industry Briefs. The past three quarterly Briefs have seen total domain name registrations of 350.5 million (end Q1, 2022), 351.5 million (Q2, 2022) and in the most recent, 349.9 million (Q3, 2022).
Google Registry has launched it’s .rsvp and .boo top-level domains, currently available through their Early Access Programmes through until 15 November where preferred domain names can be registered for an additional one-time fee which decreases each day. Then from 15 November General Availability commences for both TLDs.
Continue reading “.BOO, Get Your .RSVP Domain”As economies around the world hit headwinds with rising prices, worker shortages and interest rate rises, it seems domain name registration growth has stagnated. During the second quarter of 2022, the total number of domain names registered across all top-level domains increased by 1.0 million, or 0.3%, in the second quarter of 2022 according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief released this week. In the 12 months to 30 June, domain name registrations increased by 10.4 million, or 3.0%. This took the total to 351.5 million domain name registrations.
The .org TLD has some new siblings with .charity, .foundation and .gives now officially part of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) family.