Phase 1 of the EPDP on gTLD Registration Data is now complete
On 4 March 2019 the GNSO Council held a special meeting in order to approve the recommendations of Phase 1 of the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) working group.
As you might recall, the priority window to register your equivalent top level .UK domain name based on your current domain ending in .UK (eg .CO.UK, .ORG.UK) ends June 2019.
Dominion TLDs – Price Change and Verification Removal for .AUTOS
Registry operator Dominion has announced the discontinuation of .AUTOS verification process starting on March 15th, 2019 at 17:00 UTC.
.GAL – Price Promotion
Registry operator Asociación PuntoGal has announced that it is running a pricing promotion on. GAL domains from 1 to 28 February 2019, with new 2-year registrations offered at a reduced fee.
Update on .eu domains following Brexit
EURid, the Registry for .eu domain names, has published a Brexit action plan following discussions with the European Commission. Such discussions came about after the Commission’s Notice to Stakeholders, published in March last year, announced that UK undertakings and organisations would no longer be eligible to hold .eu domain names.
From 1 February 2019, “DNS Flag Day”, DNS systems around the world are going to disable some backwards compatibility features. This means that old or misconfigured DNS servers will no longer function correctly. Specifically, zones hosted on servers that do not support EDNS0 queries will fail to resolve correctly.
Serbia – launch of IDNs
The Register of National Internet Domain Names of Serbia (RNIDS), the registry for .rs domains, has launched an Initial Registration Period (‘IRP’) for IDNs.
.BOT
Registry operator Amazon has extended its second Limited Registration Period to 1 May 2019.
According to the latest Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief there are now approximately 342.4 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), which is an increase of approximately 2.6 million domain name registrations.