News

CENTR has published a paper on the ITU’s role and ambitions in the Internet Governance space.

If you ever wondered what the ITU does, why this could be relevant (for ccTLDs) and what you could do to contribute, than this paper is for you. 
 

Article Extract: DNS Belgium
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We have hired 4 new people in the past six months. We are delighted with this boost to the DNS Belgium team and would like to briefly introduce the new faces to you.

Nico Point joined the Operations department at the beginning of this year as network and system engineer. He was previously in a similar position at Option. Nico is passionate about Linux, open source and networks and will certainly make a valuable contribution towards the operational management of our future projects, such as the launch of .vlaanderen and .brussels. 

Kurt Gielen became the 9th member of the Operations department, where he runs a team of 4 system engineers. Together with his team, Kurt will be shaping and rolling out DNS Belgium’s future IT infrastructure and architecture. Before joining us, he worked at Jessa Hospital in Hasselt. With these new appointments, DNS Belgium develops a strong, professional Operations arm. 

The ladies in the customer support department also have a new colleague. Jasper Kesteloot works with us full-time and maintains a general overview of all incoming enquiries and issues raised by our registrars or registrants. Jasper is also, in conjunction with other support staff, responsible for following up on various administrative matters. In the past, Jasper worked in the medical sector in a customer & sales support role for Abbott Vascular.

A brand-new position was created when Ronald Geens began working with us in June. As Product Manager, Ronald is responsible for DNS Belgium’s 3 products. In addition to the long-established .be extension, he will now be helping shape two new products, .vlaanderen and .brussels. Ronald will be mapping out how the 3 product lines evolve in the future and what features or services DNS Belgium will be offering with them. He will also be closely involved in the development of a new registration platform for .vlaanderen and .brussels. Ronald was previously product manager at Newtec.

These new members of the team will help set us firmly on the path to dealing with the challenges that lie ahead.

The CENTR Workshop Jamboree has concluded in Paris last week.  The series of 6 themed workshops spanning 3 days was a chance for staff from the CENTR membership to come together and discussed in detail with their colleagues from around Europe.  

From today, new, short .uk web domains are available alongside .co.uk for the first time ever, with British icon and tech enthusiast Stephen Fry the first person to make the switch.
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CENTR has published it's report on the RIPE68 meeting recently held in Warsaw 

The Report can be found here
 

CENTR has published its latest ccTLD newsletter for May 2014 - :

CENTRnews - May 2014

See all previous editions of the CENTRnews
 

The CENTR Board has submitted a comment on the consultation on enhancing ICANN’s accountability.  See the full text below or download here 


FULL TEXT:
CENTR is the European country code TLD organisation. Its objectives include promoting and participating in the development of high standards and best practices among ccTLD Registries. CENTR has 52 full members who manage the Internet country code for their country. Together, CENTR members are responsible for over 80% of all registered country code domain names worldwide.

We welcome the opportunity to contribute to the public dialogue on enhancing ICANN’s accountability. ICANN’s accountability should be guided by accountability principles that are accepted and agreed upon by the ICANN community as a whole. For the sake of enhancing a well-structured accountability framework, we recommend the legal, administrative, financial, representative and social aspects of accountability be taken into account. Therefore, it might be worth considering whether to launch a broader consultation to reach a consensus on what ICANN should be accountable for and subsequently to determine how ICANN’s accountability could be enhanced.

We would like to comment on the following, specific characteristic of the process:

• Any effort to strengthen ICANN’s accountability should not make the current processes more complex than the existing ones. We are confident that changes to the present mechanisms should aim at simplifying the process rather than introducing additional layers without jeopardising the highest possible accountability standards.

• We are pleased with the creation of an ICANN Accountability Working Group to coordinate the community dialogue and acknowledge the importance of external expertise in bringing in new ideas. The identification of external experts should be a joint and balanced effort on behalf of ICANN’s staff and the Community. 

• Knowledge and expertise gaps impact the effectiveness of the current accountability process. These gaps that occur during the input phase and during the evaluation and mapping of the results against the initial input should be carefully assessed and filled by ICANN in a timely manner.

At present, the resources required to monitor the processes, review the outcomes and hold ICANN accountable for the community are too large to be managed by one individual, especially considering the voluntary aspect of this work. Consequently, the aforementioned tasks are divided between different groups and individuals. This contributes to fragmentation and knowledge gaps.

The ICANN staff for the Supporting Organisations and Advisory Committees has done a great job so far, but the independence of their work might be questionable. Therefore, each constituency should consider putting in place a dedicated resource who could take on the advisory and coordinating role for its community. This resource should be funded by the constituency and not by ICANN.

We regret to underline that the timeline for providing input regarding this crucial aspect of ICANN is extremely short. As a matter of fact, despite the minimum requirements being met, it would be much more desirable that this kind of process benefit from a longer comment period in the ultimate interest of the communities that voluntarily participate in ICANN’s work on a daily basis and, above all, of the accountability process itself. The goal of obtaining a fast outcome of the process might imply a severe risk of missing, if not excluding, relevant perspectives that could represent an added value for ICANN and its community.

Today, the new gTLD .club replaced .guru in the number spot in terms of total registrations.  .club now has around 59 thousand registrations and growing around  3-5% per day over the past few days. Pricing of .club (godaddy) starts at 15 USD per year. Below shows the top 5 largest new gTLDs (registrations). 


According the the latest figures as recorded by CENTR the total number of registrations across all new gTLDs is around 830 thousand across 249 strings*.  Growth in the new gTLDs has been fairly consistent over the past few months as the strings are slowly delegated into the root and essentially lead by a group of around 20 strings which have over 10 thousand registrations each.  

*Some delegated strings are not included 

Source: DNS Belgium

From 19 May 2014, the Board at DNS Belgium will be strengthened by the arrival of Baudouin Corl