News
CENTR publishes the CENTRstats Global TLD Report Edition 3/2022
The CENTRstats Global TLD Report Edition 3/2022 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.
Independent study shows very low number of geographical indications disputes within European domain names
The EU is reforming its legal framework concerning geographical indications (GI) protection and has put forward provisions expanding GI protection to domain names in two recent legislative proposals concerning agricultural products and craft/industrial products. In order to support greater GI protection on the internet, both proposals mandate the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to establish a “domain name information and alert system”.
EU Policy Update – November 2022
In a nutshell: November was a fruitful month for negotiations in the EU bubble, with both the Council of the EU and the European Parliament adopting the NIS 2 Directive, and the European Parliament adopting the CER Directive. Co-legislators also reached a political agreement on the e-Evidence proposal. The Council adopted its General Approach on the EUID proposal, whilst the IMCO Committee issued its Opinion on the file. As for geographical indications, the AGRI Committee issued its Draft Report on the proposal for agricultural products and received numerous amendments, which was also the case for IMCO and JURI regarding amendments on the craft and industrial products proposal. The EDPS released its Opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act.
CENTR Report on IETF115
The 115th IETF meeting took place in London between 5 and 11 November 2022 with 100-plus working group sessions, 2 technology deep dive sessions, a 2-day IETF hackathon and various side events. Marco Davids and Caspar Schutijser from SIDN Labs attended the meeting and have written a summary of the main points of relevance for CENTR members.
New ITU Secretary General: "I believe in multi-stakeholder cooperation"
Doreen Bogdan-Martin is the first woman at the head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The US American easily won the race against the only other candidate in the October election of the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference (PP22), former Deputy Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, Rashid Ismailov (139 against 25 of 172 Member States). Russia at the same time lost its seat on the ITU Council. Together with her newly elected Deputy Tomas Lamanauskas of Lithuania, Bogdan-Martin gives the ITU a more western face. Elected as the ITU Director of the Development Bureau four years ago, she could turn the page in the history of the UN body founded in 1865 to lean more into its development oriented mandate. While Western countries and internet technical bodies welcomed decisions at the Plenipotentiary to leave the internet related mandate of the ITU pretty much unchanged, Bogdan-Martin, who starts her term on 1 January 2023, has to deal with the growing geopolitical tensions following Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
2022 Annual CENTR Meeting: CENTR Chair looks back on the past year
2022 turned out to be quite a challenging year, but CENTR has proven – as many times before – to be robust and well-prepared. The Annual CENTR Meeting which took place last week in Brussels gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect on this busy year.
CENTR is hiring a Senior Policy Advisor!
We are looking for a dedicated, experienced and highly motivated Policy Advisor to join our small, fabulous team and serve our international and multilingual membership which is at the core of the internet infrastructure. Starting date from 1 February 2023.
EU Policy Update – October 2022
In a nutshell: The European Commission revealed its Work Programme for 2023 and issued its proposal for a Council Recommendation on a coordinated approach to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructure, whilst the Council released its conclusions on ICT supply chain security. The Digital Services Act was published in the Official Journal of the EU. Parliamentary committees released documents on the reform of the geographical indications’ framework in the EU for craft and industrial products. Commissioner Johansson confirmed that blocking orders under the CSAM Regulation would not apply to DNS4EU. The European Court of Justice’s Advocate General stated that national authorities should be able to access data linked to IP addresses where no other means to identify holders of addresses suspected of copyright infringement is available.
Signs-of-life crawler performance report
CENTR has been running the Signs-of-Life domain crawler (v1) in stable production now for almost 2 years. We believe this data is important for assessing the general health of domains among ccTLD registries, so we consider it important to ensure that accuracy in the crawler is high. For this reason, we plan to provide reports on its performance and have now completed the first one, which shows that the crawler has been performing very well, with an accuracy rating of 94% for ccTLDs and 96% for gTLDs. This report provides more detail, breaking down elements of the crawler and data science metrics such as precision, recall and the F1 score.
CENTR publishes White Paper on registration data accuracy in European national domain registries
CENTR, the association which represents European national top-level domain name registries (ccTLDs) such as .si or .eu, has published a White Paper on registration data accuracy in European national domain registries.