News

At the end of 2020, the European Commission came up with a proposal to revise EU cybersecurity legislation, following the allegedly increased cyberthreats due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NIS 2 Directive proposal aims to improve the resilience and incident response capacities of public and private entities, deemed to be critical infrastructures. These entities also include domain name registries, registrars, DNS service providers and root servers operators.

In a nutshell: Ursula von der Leyen delivered her speech on the State of the Union. Denmark and Germany’s ministers called for stricter rules in the Digital Services Act (DSA), while EEA EFTA states called for more balance with freedom of expression. JURI and ITRE adopted their opinions on the DSA. The Slovenian Presidency circulated its proposal for a compromise text on the DSA. Potential areas for consensus were debated in trilogues regarding the e-Evidence proposal. The Netherlands released a non-paper on the Data Act ahead of the EU proposal expected in December.

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.