Nameshield offers you new resources that will be regularly published and available for download on the Nameshield’s website: the “5 minutes to understand” documents.
Quick and easy to read documents to understand the basics of domain names in just a few minutes.
Discover now the first document “5 minutes to understand – The reading a domain name“:
The .eu Web Awards is an online competition, launched in 2014 by EURID, the .eu registry, which rewards the best websites in the .eu, .ею or .ευ extensions, divided into 5 categories:
It is possible to apply until 05 August 2020 and the participation is free of charge: https://webawards.eurid.eu/
Once your candidature has been validated, it’s up to the public to vote! The 3 websites under each category that have won the most votes will then become finalists.
The big winners will be revealed at the Gala held in Brussels on 18 November 2020, where the 15 finalists will be invited.
The 5 winners will win the following prizes:
Do you own a website in .eu, .ею or .ευ? This contest can be a nice opportunity to liven up your social networks, generate additional traffic and win the prizes mentioned above.
Interested? Visit https://webawards.eurid.eu/ for more information.
The news came on 30 April through a press release from the ICANN Board announcing that it had taken the decision to reject the sale of Public Interest Registry (PIR), the .ORG registry, to the private equity firm Ethos Capital.
For reminder, at the end of 2019, the announcement of the sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital created a real debate and caused several concerns from NGOs, such as the increase of .ORG prices and the implementation of rights protection policies that could lead to a form of censorship (Find all the articles on this subject on the blog).
In mid-April, while the organization had to decide whether or not to approve the sale of the registry, the transaction was still pending. ICANN allowed itself additional time to complete its review, after receiving numerous letters of opposition, including one from California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra.
The decision to reject this deal was finally announced on Thursday 30 April “as a result of various factors that create unacceptable uncertainty over the future of the third largest gTLD registry”.
One of the main reasons for this decision is the “change from the fundamental public interest nature of PIR to an entity that is bound to serve the interests of its corporate stakeholders, and which has no meaningful plan to protect or serve the .ORG community.”
Among the reasons for this rejection is also the issue of financing, since this transaction could compromise the financial stability of the registry. Indeed, the proposed sale would change PIR from a not-for-profit entity to a for-profit entity with a $360 million debt obligation, which would not benefit PIR or the .ORG community, but the financial interests of Ethos and its investors.
Furthermore, the PIR proposal to implement a “Stewardship Council“, which aimed to make the entity more accountable to the community, did not convince ICANN either. According to the organization, this council “might not be properly independent“.
ICANN’s decision is therefore a victory for the .ORG community and Electronic Frontier Foundation, which does not stop there and adds “the .ORG registry still needs a faithful steward, because the Internet Society has made clear it no longer wants that responsibility. ICANN should hold an open consultation, as they did in 2002, to select a new operator of the .ORG domain that will give nonprofits a real voice in its governance, and a real guarantee against censorship and financial exploitation.”
The crux of the war for high-visibility websites is the download time. As a natural referencing factor admitted by Google, this download time can be significantly impacted during DNS resolution. If it is necessary to rely on a first-class DNS infrastructure, the choice of the extension associated with a domain name is important. Indeed, not all registries perform equally well in terms of DNS, not to say that some have disappointing performance. The offer in terms of TLDs (nearly 1400) has greatly increased since ICANN’s New Extensions Program. Analysis to follow.
Resolving a domain such as nameshield.net follows several steps before you can contact the content server. The DNS resolver contacts the root DNS servers (.), then the DNS servers of the registry of the extension concerned (.net) in order to obtain the list of DNS servers responsible for the domain, and finally these DNS servers to obtain the requested response. The response obtained is certainly cached by the DNS resolver (generally managed by the Internet Service Provider), but this will not always be the case depending on the popularity of your domain.
This means that if the DNS for the top level domain (.net) is slow, it may actually delay DNS resolution for the domain itself and, in the very unlikely worst case scenario, even cause a breakdown. There’s not much you can do about this, apart from choosing the right TLD.
Bunny CDN, a Slovenian content delivery player, conducted the following surprising analysis. Relying on their global network, they monitored DNS performance worldwide from more than 50 sites and networks.
For each TLD, their system chose a random name server published for each top-level domains and queried a random domain name. The results were grouped by region and the data recorded every 10 seconds.
They tested 42 of the most popular top-level domains and then aggregated the results into a global median average and an 85-percentile aggregation (the 15% slowest responses were not taken into account). These tests were conducted only from their network, so a more complete study would certainly be worthwhile, but they provide a good overview.
The most surprising domains are .info and .org, which have shown really poor performance, especially in the 85 percentile range, despite their seniority and the millions of domains registered. It seems that 4 of the 6 names servers function extremely poorly, which explains the poor results.
The .net and .com have been very slightly slower than expected in Europe and North America, but otherwise offer excellent and stable performance in all regions, visible in the global median. .net and .com have much larger networks, but remain a very interesting choice for absolute maximum performance.
Less expected is the performance of the .co, .biz and .in TLDs, well ahead of the others.
Some new domains (.online, .top, .blog…), which are attractive from a marketing point of view and growing strongly, show disappointing performances…
… on the other hand, very good surprises for .live, .email, .news, managed by Donuts Inc or .club and .buzz managed by Neustar Inc, with, however, a very important decrease in performance in regions outside Europe and North America, which further aggravates the problem.
42 of the most popular TLDs among the 1400+ available have been tested. Without drawing any definitive conclusions, we can assume that many may not work much better.
Do you need to revolutionize the management of your domain name portfolio and the choice of TLDs for your most visible websites? Should you switch everything to .biz or .co immediately to increase performance?
Certainly not. First of all, DNS responses are heavily cached, especially for very popular websites, resolvers may not need to reach many top-level names servers. Then, the choice of a domain name is primarily driven by marketing imperatives (brand, geographical area, name availability) that are often far more impactful than the additional 50 milliseconds of loading time for the first page to load.
However, if you are trying to compress absolutely every last bit of performance and ensure high reliability in a system where every last millisecond counts, then you may want to think twice before choosing your domain. The differences aren’t huge, but if you’re aiming for that one-second loading time, things can add up to 200 ms in some cases.
Choosing the right TLD based on DNS performance is indeed a good thing, but probably not a cause for too much concern.
As a registrar, Nameshield has an accurate view of the typology of abandoned domain names and domain names kept by their holders when they clean up their portfolio.
As in all sectors of activity, phenomena that could be said to be “trendy” can even be seen in cybersquatting and therefore in domain names that are abandoned or maintained.
Let’s take the example of typosquatting, there was a time when it was essential to register domain names that included your trademark with as many typographical variants as possible (if your trademark contained the letter O, it was important to register a version with the number 0 instead of the O etc.), because cybersquatters were then very focused on this type of hijacking attempt. A decade later, cybercrime has changed and, while it is still important to register typographical variants, only the most pertinent ones are relevant today. As a result, many companies have abandoned the most distant variants.
The same goes for extensions. At certain periods, the risks of cybersquatting are greater depending on the registration conditions. A “first-come, first-served” extension is more at risk than a TLD requiring, for example, a locally registered trademark. Since the domain names registrations rules are set by each registry, they are likely to change over time, with the result that potential abandonments may occur.
An interesting study published at the end of 2019 by Frank Moraes, indicated that considering the first 8 extensions, only 29.79% of registered domain names would be renewed each year. Of the remaining 70.21%, 41.22% would simply expire and 28.99% would be registered by a new holder.
Only one domain name out of three would therefore be renewed the year following its registration! However, the rates vary significantly and the highest renewal percentages are unsurprisingly for .NET (46.3%), .ORG (44.24%) and .INFO (34.56%).
On the contrary, the lowest renewal rates are for .CN (1.72%), .BIZ (16.6%) and .TOP (22.22%).
What about .COM? The .COM TLD remains undoubtedly the most popular extension. If the study cited above only places the .COM in fourth position in the percentage of renewals (certainly taking into account the sampling), the renewal rate of the .COM is more around 80% and is relatively stable from year to year.
A few months ago, in previous articles, we mentioned the sale by Internet Society of Public Interest Registry (PIR), the .ORG registry, to Ethos Capital, a private equity firm.
The .ORG is the reference extension for non-profit organizations and the .ORG registry represents more than 10.5 million domains. For reminder, the announcement of the sale of the registry caused several concerns in the NGO community.
In front of these many complaints, ICANN had already postponed the approval of the .ORG registry’s sale to Ethos Capital and requested additional information from Internet Society.
On Thursday 16 April, when the ICANN Board was to decide whether or not to approve the sale of the registry, it was finally decided at that meeting, to postpone it again until 4 May 2020. This fourth postponement was caused by a letter received the day before from California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, asking ICANN to reject the sale. He explains that it “raises serious concerns that cannot be overlooked“.
“Empowering a for-profit entity that could undermine the accessibility and affordability of the .org domain, which serves nonprofits, should concern all of us” the Attorney General’s office told The Register.
In his letter, the Attorney General expressed several concerns about the transaction, including the secret nature of the proposed buyer, Ethos Capital: “Little is known about Ethos Capital and its multiple proposed subsidiaries“. Ethos Capital is criticized for its unusual corporation structure (the purchase involves six different companies, all of which were registered on the same day in October 2019) and its lack of transparency regarding its future plans.
In its notice published last Thursday, ICANN affirms having listened to the community and having demanded greater transparency and more guarantees from PIR. According to the organization, the Attorney General’s letter does not take into account the recent work that PIR has done regarding Public Interest Commitments, to make the entity more responsible to the community. ICANN requested PIR to strengthen these commitments, and a draft of the revised Public Interest Commitments has been provided to ICANN.
ICANN has also been subject to a number of criticisms during the entire process, particularly as it appeared that the organization’s staff was pushing for approval of the transaction despite near universal opposition to it from the Internet community.
In addition, early last week, ICANN’s founding CEO Michael Roberts and original Board Chair Esther Dyson wrote a letter to Xavier Becerra criticizing the transaction and accusing their successors of abandoning ICANN’s core principles.
According to the Attorney General, this transaction will have an impact on ICANN’s reputation given the way the organization has handled the situation.
Not only ICANN and Ethos have been criticized by the Attorney General’s office, Xavier Becerra also blames the Internet Society for proposing the sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital: “ISOC purports to support the Internet, yet its actions, from the secretive nature of the transaction, to actively seeking to transfer the .ORG registry to an unknown entity, are contrary to its mission and potentially disruptive to the same system it claims to champion and support“.
Xavier Becerra’s letter does not threaten ICANN with action if it does approve the sale. However, it does indicate that the Attorney General of California holds significant authority over the organization and is prepared to act, particularly since this sale could affect hundreds of thousands of other non-profit organizations.
“Given the concerns stated above, and based on the information provided, the .ORG registry and the global Internet community – of which innumerable Californians are a part – are better served if ICANN withholds approval of the proposed sale and transfer of PIR and the .ORG registry to the private equity firm Ethos Capital. This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community.”
In a notice published last Thursday, ICANN thus declared the postponement of its decision: “We have agreed to extend the review period to 4 May 2020, to permit additional time to complete our review.”
“Domainers” are always a step ahead when it comes to taking advantage of a good or bad situation. For example, some will anticipate elections by registering the names of political figures, others by taking advantage of a sport or cultural event. Consequently, regarding domain names, there will be opportunities for speculative registrations.
In the case of “COVID19.com“, it seems clear that at the time of this domain name registration on February 11, 2020, the holder obviously wants to speculate on the “COVID 19” virus, a term that can generate multiple requests in any language. The name is available for sale for $10,000 USD.
However, instead of simply redirecting the domain name to commercial links, the holder chose to redirect this strategic name to the World Health Organization (WHO) website. Is this a citizen’s initiative? Unlikely, because given the current context, using such a name to make a direct profit through commercial links could lead to a violation of the Registrar’s registration conditions.
If the holder does not immediately benefit from this domain name, he will at least have the merit to draw our attention to him for the time of an article.
Since last Thursday, the South African government has imposed to all websites using domain names in .ZA to propose a link that redirects towards the official Covid-19 information website implemented by the government: www.sacoronavirus.co.za
This new rule applies to all .ZA websites, regardless of their content.
The two other extensions managed by ZADNA registry, JOBURG and .CAPETOWN are also affected by this rule.
In the same logic, the registry also invites Internet services providers to block any websites which spread fake news.
Lastly, it is interesting to note that the government’s COVID information website is not www.coronavirus.co.za but www.sacoronavirus.co.za. This is because the domain name www.coronavirus.co.za has been registered by a domainer who proposes on his website to resell the name in question.
Like all crisis or news, COVID-19 led to a massive registration of domain names containing the associated terms, some unscrupulous players seeking to take advantage of the situation.
Unsurprisingly, during this unprecedented and complicated period, there has been a high increase in the number of cybercriminal attacks of all kinds.
At the end of 2019, the announcement of the .org registry’s sale, Public Interest Registry (PIR) by Internet Society to Ethos Capital, a private equity firm, created a debate, which was also the subject of a previous article on this blog.
For reminder, this announcement caused several concerns from NGOs, such as the increase of .ORG prices and the implementation of rights protection policies that could lead to a form of censorship, as is already the practice in some countries. These fears led Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to launch the SaveDotOrg campaign to raise awareness about the potential impact of this sale. To date, 846 organizations and 25 119 people have signed this petition demanding Internet Society to stop the sale.
In front of these many complaints, ICANN postponed the approval of the .ORG registry’s sale to Ethos Capital and requested additional information from Internet Society.
In response to these criticisms, Ethos Capital and Public Interest Registry try to reassure by proposing the implementation of “Public Interest Commitments” (PIC), binding commitments which would ensure that the .org prices’ increase would be limited.
Among these commitments, they also propose the creation of a “Stewardship Council” (a council for the .org management) which could influence decisions taken by PIR and thus ensure the preservation of freedom of expression.
These PIC would be added to the Registry Agreement, the contract between the registry and ICANN regarding the functioning of the registry.
During the last ICANN summit, organized remotely from 7 to 12 March 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, several NGOs, including EFF, mentioned this .ORG registry’s acquisition by Ethos Capital and asked ICANN about how it plans to review the change of control of the .ORG registry.
According to EFF, forming a “Stewardship Council” will not resolve the NGOs’ concerns. Indeed, the initial members of this council will directly or indirectly be selected by PIR and PIR will have the ability to veto new council members, which would thus ensure that the council will stay in lockstep with PIR.
Regarding the .ORG prices, according to NGOs, the implementation of the PIC doesn’t ensure a limitation of the prices increase. An amending of the Registry agreement can be negotiated at any time by the registry’s owner and ICANN, despite a public opposition. That’s what happened in June 2019, when the .ORG Registry Agreement was revised to diminish registrants’ rights and remove price caps. Furthermore, ICANN indicated in 2019, its interest in exiting the role of price regulation, but the PIC implementation would place ICANN back into that role.
Therefore, according to NGOs, these “Public Interest Commitments” would not protect adequately the .org community.
The NGOs’ questions remained without answer during the last ICANN summit, and this acquisition is still under review by ICANN.
“We acknowledge the questions and concerns that are being raised” says ICANN. “To ease those concerns and maintain trust in the .ORG community, we urge PIR, ISOC, and Ethos Capital to act in an open and transparent manner throughout this process. […] We will thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluate the proposed acquisition to ensure that the .ORG registry remains secure, reliable, and stable.”
To be continued.
.IN Registry launches new Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) in Indian Language.
IDN registrations will begin on March 16th 2020 and listed as below:
Internationalized Domain Name (IDN)
.ಭಾರತ
.ଭାରତ
.ভাৰত
.भारतम्
.भारोत
.بارت
.ڀارت
.ഭാരതം
Language
Kannada
Oriya
Assamese
Sanskrit
Santali
Kashmiri
Sindhi
Malayalam
The launch schedule would be as follows:
Note that the possibility of registration during the priority phase of SUNRISE for foreign holders starts a beat later.
For more information on the conditions for registration, don’t hesitate to contact us.
