News

Since 2016 the ICANN community has been struggling with the relationship between its multistakeholder model and the reality of regulatory developments. Often these regulatory developments overrule the outcome of the multistakeholder discussions or impact its delicate status quo. A session at ICANN 71 on the impact of regulatory developments on ICANN policy topics touched on a number of aspects, but tip-toed around the really difficult questions.

From 1-3 June, CENTR held its 2021 Members’ Days (formerly known as the Jamboree), a meeting that brings together the whole CENTR community for three days of cross-working group sessions and networking. This year was slightly different as the CENTR Registrar Day, which is usually held in October, was incorporated into this meeting.

In a nutshell: The European Parliament is steadily advancing on developing its positions on the proposals for the Digital Services Act, the NIS 2 Directive, the CER Directive, and has adopted a resolution on the challenges of sports events organisers. The Portuguese presidency in the Council of the EU published a progress report on the Digital Services Act. ENISA published its first EU cybersecurity certification scheme. The Cybercrime Convention Committee within the Council of Europe approved the draft of the 2nd Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention concerning access to electronic evidence. The European Data Protection Board expressed concerns over the alignment of the draft text of the 2nd Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention with the EU data protection framework.

The CENTR Board of Directors met online on 18 and 19 May for a strategic offsite meeting. The focus of the meeting was to develop the strategy for 2022, with a view to the longer term impacts of a rapidly changing environment in which the domain business operates.

Gert Döring has chaired the RIPE Address Policy Working Group for close to two decades. Representing one of the first German ISPs, SpaceNet, he helped create RIPE’s process for adopting policies. Looking back, he thinks the RIPE community has to start adapting to the “bigger” internet. But even as he departs from his chair role, he will continue to be present, he says to CENTR.

In an appeal to the RIPE community Patrik Fälström, Technical Director and Head of Security at Netnod, and Stephen Farrell, Researcher at Trinity College Dublin and long time Security Area Director at the IETF, spoke out against the next wave of “not so secure encryption” proposals from the European Union. A recent Council of Ministers’ paper from the Portugese Presidency underlines once more the need for access to end-to-end encrypted communication.

DNS traffic encryption is all the rage, with standardisation, software and deployment advancing. But root server operators are questioning encryption for traffic going up to their servers. In a joint public statement of 31 March they declared they would not introduce encryption for the 13 root servers at this point in time. We asked the operators of root servers I and K, Lars-Johan Liman from Swedish operator Netnod and Kaveh Ranjibar from Ripe NCC, why root operators do not want to secure DNS queries by encryption.

Brussels, 19 May 2021 - CENTR, which represents European national top-level domain name registries (ccTLDs) such as .ie or .eu, has published a comment on the Proposal for a Directive on measures for a high common level of cybersecurity across the Union, repealing Directive (EU) 2016/1148 (also known as the NIS 2 Directive).

We are looking for a dedicated and highly motivated Policy Officer to join our small, fabulous team in Brussels and serve our international and multilingual membership who are at the core of the internet infrastructure.

In a nutshell: The European Commission unveiled its proposal on the Artificial Intelligence Act and the EU Strategy to tackle organised crime until 2025. ENISA published research directions for the EU digital strategic autonomy. The Council of Europe published a new draft text of the 2nd Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention. The negotiators in the European Parliament and the Council of the EU reached a provisional agreement on temporary rules to detect and remove child abuse material. The European Parliament adopted TERREG.