News

In a nutshell: The European Commission kickstarted the year with a set of publications of relevance for ccTLDs, such as the DNS Abuse Study and the Communication on an EU Strategy on Standardisation. The Commission also released proposals for a European Declaration on Digital Rights and a Data Act. Regarding intellectual property, the Commission issued a call for evidence on the upcoming EU Toolbox against Counterfeiting, whilst the European Parliament published a Study on the Cross Border Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in the EU. Co-legislators reached a provisional agreement on amending the Europol regulation, and IMCO published its Draft Report on the EUID proposal. The EDPB launched a coordinated enforcement action on the use of cloud services by the public sector.

The CENTR Board is following Russian military actions in Ukraine with concern and strongly condemns the violation of international law and Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Ukraine’s national TLD registry is a member of CENTR and we stand with Ukrainians in their efforts to resist Russia’s invasion. We hope for a swift and peaceful resolution of the conflict, and will continue to offer support and help to our Ukrainian colleagues.

In a nutshell: The upcoming months look busy on the legislative and policy front. France took over the presidency of the Council of the EU until the end of June with an ambitious digital agenda and the aim to finalise key legislative initiatives such as the DSA and NIS 2 before the national elections. The Council of the EU approved its General Approach on the CER Directive. The European Parliament adopted its position on the DSA and is ready to enter trilogue negotiations with the Council of the EU and the European Commission. The European Commission published its long-awaited call for proposals for the deployment of DNS4EU and is looking into proposing new legislative initiatives in the fields of cybersecurity, child protection and hate speech online. It is also expected to put forward an EU Toolbox against counterfeiting, and to publish its study on DNS abuse. 

Over 2021, CENTR decided to partner up with WeForest and commit to growing a tree in exchange for every completed survey response by its members. We are delighted to announce that we surpassed our initial goal of 1000 survey responses, and were able to contribute to growing 1200 trees!

The CENTRstats Global TLD Report Q3/2021 has been published. It covers the global status and registration trends in all top-level domains (legacy gTLDs, new gTLDs and ccTLDs), with a specific focus on the European ccTLD market.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone to hear that the CENTR Secretariat has had a busy year! We have put together this infographic as our own take of the popular English Christmas song, "the 12 days of Christmas" to highlight some of our achievements over 2021, as we work to improve information access to members and to foster best practice exchanges amongst the membership. We wish you and your loved ones a wonderful end to 2021 and hope to see you in the new year!

The final in our series of Q&As with participants at IETF 112 is with Tim Wicinski. Tim is one of the chairs of the DNS PRIVate Exchange (dprive) working group that “develops mechanisms to provide confidentiality to DNS transactions in order to address concerns surrounding pervasive monitoring.” Here Tim explains the path that led to him being involved in the IETF, but more importantly, the significance of DPRIVE for TLDs and why they should be involved, underlining that he also understands they may not have the resources or time to do so.

The internet has allowed the internet governance community to stumble forward when everybody had to stay at home. Still despite ever more sophisticated tools to gather online, the effects of only working remotely are showing. This blogpost looks into the effects, potential reasons and proposals to go forward.

CENTR is proud to share its brand new website with you! This project began with a desire to refresh the visual identity of the website as well as to simplify some of the backend processes. At the same time, we tried to make it more user-friendly and easier to access the wealth of  data and knowledge that is available to the CENTR community and beyond.

Rubbing shoulders with the elite of internet experts and developing future standards are reasons why Glenn Deen is involved in developing tomorrow’s internet standards. Deen, who currently works for Comcast-NBCUniversal, is involved in the Adaptive DNS Discovery (ADD) working group, which he says everyone involved in the DNS should be interested in as it covers a lot of different user scenarios. And it is ccTLDs that understand a great many scenarios whereby ADD can be of benefit. What does ADD do? And what was Glenn’s path to being involved in the IETF? Read on.