After being twice-delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Domain Pulse is back and will take place as a face-to-face event on 17 and 18 May. The conference will be hosted by DENIC at the historical plenary chamber of the German Parliament in Bonn. For two days, there will be discussions on the trends and developments in the domain name industry.
The Austrian ccTLD hit a new milestone in September, reaching 1.4 million registrations according to the .at registry nic.at, with just over one million (1,023,492 as of 13 September) or 73.9% registered to Austrian registrants.
united-domains AG, a subsidiary of United Internet, has signed up to ipcom GmbH’s Anycast service RcodeZero DNS, joining a list of registrars and registries administering over 23 million domain names around the world.
2021’s Domain Pulse is the latest conference to fall victim to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Originally scheduled to be held in Beethoven’s home town, the German city of Bonn, in February and hosted by DENIC, it will now be held in February 2022.
Nic.at’s sister company ipcom has signed up another partner to their RcodeZero DNS anycast network, taking the total number of top-level domains using the service to at least 22. Last week the Austrian ccTLD registry announced DNS Belgium had signed an agreement that will see their 1.6 million .be, .vlaanderen and .brussels domain names hosted on the Austrian company’s RcodeZero DNS anycast network.
nic.at announced their sister company, ipcom, has signed up 3 more ccTLDs to their anycast network technology RcodeZero DNS taking the total of TLDs relying on the technology to at least 19. While the Slovenian Registry (ARNES) has been using RcodeZero for many years for their .si, they recently extended their contract. But both the Finnish (TRAFICOM) and Irish (IE Domain Registry) registries have recently signed up and implemented RcodeZero as their secondary DNS provider to strengthen their DNS infrastructure for the first time.
Citing the network’s reliability and performance, TRAFICOM uses the secondary anycast service for their half million domain names in the Finnish country code top-level domain (ccTLD).
“Traficom selects its DNS partners based on very high quality and security standards, and ipcom fulfills them. During these challenging times this is very important”, explains Juhani Juselius, Chief Specialist.
The Irish ccTLD .ie also recently signed up for the secondary anycast network RcodeZero DNS to ensure permanent availability at maximum speed for their 300,000 domains.
In addition to the new ccTLD customers, .si (ARNES) – a long term customer for many years – has also renewed their contract with ipcom.
“With the Anycast service provided by RcodeZero DNS we can increase stability and redundancy for our .si TLD DNS,” said Benjamin Zwitting, Chief Technical Officer at ARNES, explaining why they decided to continue their partnership with RcodeZero DNS.
Naturally nic.at was delighted their sister company was able to gain two new clients and add another.
“Gaining more and more European TLDs proves that we are an important anycast provider within the community,” said a very happy Richard Wein, CEO of nic.at and ipcom. “Our flexibility towards customer needs, our personal support provided by long term employees and our location in the heart of Europe, positions us as attractive provider for competitive anycast solutions. We are proud to deliver high levels of reliability, performance and maximum protection for a registry’s DNS infrastructure.”
Any why use a service such as ipcom’s RcodeZero DNS anycast technology? In their announcement, nic.at says there are benefits that can be achieved by using at least one additional secondary anycast provider. With over 30 years of experience as the .at registry, ipcom has expert knowledge that feeds directly into our anycast product development and can respond very quickly and flexibly. More than 19 registries (like .nl, .pt, .eu), with more than 15 million domains under management, rely on RcodeZero DNS. External name service monitoring proves that the RcodeZero DNS network with more than 20 nodes (for TLDs) is one of the most reliable anycast services and a trusted global provider – the perfect partner for everybody that is continuously striving for highest optimisation of its own DNS infrastructure to guarantee the highest security standards.
More information: www.rcodezero.at or by e-mail rcodezero@ipcom.at
The annual free domain name conference of the German-speaking world, Domain Pulse, is heading to the North Tyrolean Alps city of Innsbruck in Austria in February 2020 with the organisers looking towards the future, asking attendees to âgaze into the crystal ball togetherâ with them.
Day 1 is dedicated to the question of what future will bring in terms of technology, internet governance and the world of work – and where the forecasts come from! On the second day, we will highlight the issue of risk – how much are we prepared to take in our personal lives, careers and as a society? And at what price?
The presentations will focus on the future of internet governance, the talents of tomorrow, does the domain name system tell us anything about the future, artificial intelligence, looking forward with 5G and its challenges in particular relating to surveillance and citizenâs rights and what should ccTLD registries expect in the future.
This yearâs Domain Pulse conference (which is not related to the DomainPulse.com domain name news site) will be held on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 February. In 2020 the conference is organised by the Austrian ccTLD manager nic.at, with the conference rotating to be hosted by DENIC in 2021 in Germany, then by SWITCH in Switzerland in 2022.
For presentations in German, there will be a simultaneous translation service into English, but not for presentations in English into German. However given that networking is as important as the conference topics, it can still be extremely worthwhile to attend.
To register, book hotels, check out the agenda and find out more information in general, go to: domainpulse.at/dp2020. There are plenty of trains passing through Innsbruck and a number of airlines fly to Innsbruck. Conference hotels start at â¬120 per night, plus thereâs the always wonderful Thursday evening event.
UPDATE: This article was updated to reflect a misunderstanding regarding translations. There will be translations of presentations into English from German, but not for German presentations into English. The original version of this article said there would be no translations.
Finding that elusive domain name can be difficult for even the most adept of us, so a few registries have developed services to make suggestions for when your first choice isnât available. The latest of those is nic.at who has launched Domainfinder, developed in-house by their research and development team.
To showcase their Domainfinder, nic.at has put together a simple video to show off how it works.
The most well-known of services to assist in finding that elusive domain name has been developed by Verisign and is called NameStudio for their .com, .net and .tv top-level domains. As with Name Studio, Domainfinder makes suggestions of alternatives for both second and third (.co.at and .or.at) level .at domain names.
nic.atâs RcodeZero DNS service has just started supplying Anycast technology to the Polish domain extension .pl. This means that nic.at infrastructure provides supplementary hosting and security to the seventh biggest ccTLD in the EU with over 2.5 million domains. According DNSperf statistics, RcodeZero DNS is one of the fastest anycast providers worldwide.
CEO Richard Wein is delighted with the new RcodeZero DNS customer NASK, the Polish national research institute responsible for the Top Level Domain .pl.
âAfter .nl and .eu, we have succeeded in convincing another major country code TLD with a couple of million domains to use our services. In an industry where you know each other very well, this is a big compliment for me: The relevant players trust the technical competence of nic.at. This shows that even a small country can provide services to the big ones so long as you focus on quality, reliability and flexibility.â
It is the clear goal of nic.at to gain more RcodeZero DNS customers within the TLD community â also on other continents.
The technical implementation for .pl is proof of nic.atâs ability to meet individual customer requirements. The .pl TLD consists of 159 subzones. Therefore â in contrast to other customers with fewer zones â every process and check has to be performed 159 times before distributing the zone to the servers all over the globe.
The constant expansion and upgrading of the RcodeZero infrastructure is also recognised in the worldwide Ranking of DNSperf where the DNS performance of the top Anycast providers is measured. RcodeZero DNS actually ranks sixth â not far away from well-known names like Cloudflare and Wordpress.
This nic.at news release was sourced from: https://www.nic.at/en/news/nic-at/another-tld-coup-for-nicats-rcodezero-dns
The European Unionâs General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into being on 25 May 2018. For gTLDs ICANN still hasnât developed a permanent policy on how to deal with it. For ccTLDs it was somewhat simpler. The lawyers at Austriaâs ccTLD manager, nic.at, have given their verdict in a Q&A published on the registryâs website last week.
Barbara SchloÃbauer says that ânobody could anticipate what would actually happen after the implementation of GDPRâ but changes implemented include Whois data for individuals that is now available âonly includes the domain name, the registrar responsible, and necessary technical information. In addition to this, an information request form has been developed, enabling eligible people to find out who the domain holder is. The main variable was the consumersâ reaction to that, as we didnât know how many Whois requests had been sent in the past concerning natural persons. In the end, it has all been much more easygoing than expected â the extent of requests is definitely manageable.â
SchloÃbauer said that implementation wasnât as difficult as it might have been given that nic.at already ISO 27.001/2013 certified and this certification âis based on the same systems.â Bernhard Erler commented âthe GDPR topic had been a priority for all departments. In the end, there was no department which wasnât involved in the whole process â even though the daily business had to proceed without any interruptions, the collaboration was excellent.â
On a positive note, Erler said âthe most notable thing was that the topic of data protection became the focus of attention within nic.at. GDPR has managed to greatly raise awareness in relation to the importance of taking care of data.â Further, Erler believes this care of data âis also the main positive effect of GDPR: the establishment of awareness of the interaction with data â data protection is now definitely an issue of public interest.â
To read the complete Q&A with nic.atâs lawyers Barbara SchloÃbauer and Bernhard Erler, see their âHappy Birthday, GDPRâ here, or for the German version here.