News

The CENTRstats Global TLD Report Q2/2021 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.

General Manager, Peter Van Roste, shares some insights into CENTR’s strategic planning process and touches on some of the changes coming in the next few years.

In a nutshell: Slovenia took over the Presidency of the Council of the EU. The European Parliament adopted a temporary ePrivacy derogation to detect and remove child abuse. The NIS2 and CER Directives, as well as the DSA Regulation proposals advanced through the European Parliamentary discussions. The Council of the EU published its conclusions on intellectual property policy. The European Data Protection Board adopted guidelines on the concepts of controller and processor. ENISA published a report stating that supply chain cyberattacks are expected to quadruple in 2021.

The CENTRstats Global TLD Report Q1/2021 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. 

CENTR has published its Report on ICANN71, which took place virtually last week. For this meeting, rather than covering all the sessions in the GAC and ccNSO, CENTR selected the most relevant themes from the ICANN meeting, keep an eye on longer term trends and offering an analysis where relevant for ccTLDs. We published a series of blogposts over the week, which were gather together in the final report, along with some additional updates.

CENTR is excited to share the third edition of its Tech Trends Watch, which aims to give an overview of current and upcoming changes in technology from a range of standards development organisations and other technology forums, keeping in mind underlying geopolitical and industrial movements and in particular tracing the trends that may have an impact on the addressing and numbering communities.

Three years after the EU GDPR entered into force, the ICANN community is still debating the emergency measures with regard to data protection of gTLD registration data. Before the GDPR, gTLD registration data was publicly available, but the accuracy of this data is an issue that the community was facing long before that. In 2021, the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) moved on to Phase 2A, with one main issue in focus: the distinction between natural and legal persons in the domain name registration process. Meanwhile, the EPDP’s previous Phase 1 and Phase 2 policy recommendations are facing further implementation challenges: inter-dependencies between issues in different phases and disagreements on issues of importance to the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). On top of everything, other regulatory developments, such as the EU NIS 2 Directive proposal, could have a further impact on the outcomes of the EPDP, with some constituencies calling for a halt to the EPDP Phase 2 recommendations. Registration data accuracy discussions are also steadily picking up, in light of the EU NIS 2 proposal.

So-called “DNS Abuse” continues to be the prevalent cross-cutting issue across the ICANN universe. Discussions on the need to consider public interests when it comes to the numerous on-going policy development processes, along with the question of ICANN’s role in the multistakeholder ecosystem seems to be driven by the pressing issue of the darkened WHOIS post-GDPR, and as a result the inability of law enforcement and other third parties to address DNS abuse in an effective and timely manner. Let’s try to dissect this complex issue by looking into the challenges for the ICANN community to move forward.

ccTLD governance models¹ are often a source of confusion and concern. How is it possible that there is no standard governance model for one of the most visible operators of the Domain Name System (DNS)? Why are they different? Which one is the best?