News

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?

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.