John Demco
ICANN Meets This Week in Costa Rica – ICANN is meeting this week in San José, Costa Rica. Applications for new gTLDs are currently being accepted, and various aspects of the new gTLD program will be discussed during the week. A sampling of other topics includes WHOIS, the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) TLDs, DNS risk management, IP addressing activities and IPv6 deployment. As well, the unexpected cancellation of the IANA Contract RFP may be a hot topic. Remote participation will be available for many sessions.
IANA Contract RFP Cancelled, Current Contract Extended – The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has cancelled its Request for Proposal (RFP) for a new Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) contract. The RFP was issued last November, and was cancelled because the NTIA “received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community”. The current contract with ICANN has been extended until September 30, 2012. The IANA technical functions, including the maintenance of the DNS root zone and the allocation of Internet numbering resources, are fundamental to the operation of the Internet.
Domain Name Registrations Surpass 225 Million – At the end of 2011, there were more than 225 million domain name registrations worldwide, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign. This represents an annual growth of 20.4 million or 10%. The annual growth as reported three months ago was 16.9 million or 8.6%. Registrations from the ccTLDs stood at 90.6 million, a 13.2% annual increase. The ten largest domains are: .com, .de (Germany), .net, .uk (United Kingdom), .org, .info, .tk (Tokelau), .nl (Netherlands), .ru (Russian Federation), and .eu (European Union).
Picks To Click
- “Domain name seizures and .CA”, by Byron Holland of CIRA.
- CIRA has announced that its .CA WHOIS lookup service “will now only return a single search result for the exact term entered into the search bar.”
Timeline
- Sun, Mar 11 – Fri, Mar 16: ICANN meetings in San José, Costa Rica
- Fri, Mar 23: last day for 2012 .CA Impact Awards entries
- Thu, Apr 12: last day for new gTLD applications
- Mon, May 14: 25th anniversary of the delegation of the .CA domain
- Sun, Jun 24 – Fri, Jun 29: ICANN meetings in Prague, Czech Republic