.Africa: California Judge Reverses Tentative Ruling on Technicality, Case set for second hearing

The continuing case of African nonprofit DotConnectAfrica’s vs ICANN for the .Africa domain is set for another hearing January 31, 2017  after DCA filed an ex parte application for a temporary restraining order (“TRO “) PDF motion. On Thursday December 22, 2016, the Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Howard L. Halm issued a written tentative …

DNSSEC Deployment 2016 Records Growth

A new report published State of DNSSEC Deployment 2016 there has been steady and strong growth in both the statistics around DNSSEC signing and validation — and also in the number of tools and libraries available to support DNSSEC. That growth, however, is not evenly distributed. While many separate sites provide DNSSEC statistics, this report that …

.bangla domain goes live

Users can now register the long-awaited dot bangla (.বাংলা) IDN after it was officially launched by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, allowing web users to create websites with Bangla web addresses. The prime minister launched the dot bangla domains at the Ganabhaban , three months after the final clearance by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names …

.blog Landrush: Domain open to the general public as of 21 November

WordPress.com owner Automattic is making .blog available to the general public as of 21 November, following a somewhat controversial landrush period. Earlier this month, the registry opened domain registrations to non-trademark owners for the seven-day landrush period, but was accused of pre-registering and keeping the best keywords for itself. Automattic responded to the criticism on …

Council of Europe Paper discusses .Africa legal process from a human rights perspective

The new gTLD process has created many precedents, apart from being the largest ever single expansion of domains; it has also raised pertinent issues that touch on many spheres of ethics, human rights, ownership, brands among others. .Africa is among the most controversial domains having gone through an unprecedented path of accountability. The domain has …

.shop domains go live

More than 600 new generic top-level domains—the characters that appear after the dot in website addresses—have been released to the public since 2014, but few have been of broad interest to online retailers. The addition of  .shop and .shopping may spark retailers’ interest. Both go on sale to the general public later this month—.shop on …