Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
The Gabonese government has taken back control of their .ga ccTLD from Freenom who have provided registry services for the past decade. ccTLDs managed by the Dutch backend registry provider Freenom are well known as havens for spammers and phishers, recently being sued by Facebook’s owner Meta for, as Krebs On Security reported, allegedly ignoring “abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.”
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.
Ever wondered what the impact of registry fee increases for a top-level domain have on registrations? Afnic’s Loïc Damilaville has recently published a paper attempting to analyse the impact Verisign’s increases in the registry fee for .com and .net have had.
auDA has released a Request for Tender (RFT) for a backend registry operator for the .au ccTLD and the 4.2 million domain names under management.
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).
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 number of .de domain names registered grew by 460,000, or 2.75%, to 17,160,504 in 2021 cementing .de’s position as the world’s largest ccTLD. This was an increase over 2020 when .de domain registrations grew 376,000 or 2.30%.
Twelve months ago domain name registrations were on the decline, but at the end of the first quarter of 2022 it’s a different story. As of 31 March, there were 350.5 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains, an increase of 8.8 million, or 2.6%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2021 according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief. Over the 12 months to 31 March registrations increased by 13.2 million or 3.9%.
After total domain name registrations decreased by 2.7 million, or 0.7%, to 364.6 million in the third quarter of 2021, they were back on the up in the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter of 2021 closed with 341.7 million domains across all TLDs, an increase of 3.3 million domain name registrations, or 1.0%, compared to the third quarter of 2021 according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief. Domain name registrations have increased by 1.6 million, or 0.5%, year over year.