Nominet held their second annual .uk registrar conference at Wembley Stadium last week where they released their Domain Name Industry Report 2008 that highlights some interesting statistics about domain name registrations both in the United Kingdom and throughout the world.

The report also shows the importance of a .uk domain name to small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) as their primary domain name. There has also been a continuing increase in popularity of country code domain names driven by strong growth in countries such as China and Russia. This has pushed the market share of country codes to 40 per cent of the 174 million domain names across the world. … more

Microsoft has charged a Florida company with cybersquatting in a new lawsuit filed Wednesday reports IDG. In the lawsuit, Microsoft listed 23 domain names that it says are registered to Domain Investments and contain Microsoft trademarks or intentional misspellings of such names. … more

US government urged to deploy DNS security measures, but through ICANN not VeriSign

Internet security gurus and leading vendors are urging the US federal government to rapidly deploy security and authentication mechanisms at the top level of the DNS hierarchy - the root zone. The comments are the result of a call for public comments regarding the deployment of DNSSEC by the NTIA that closed earlier this week. … more

AFNIC have published their annual report on the French domain name industry. Today there are almost 1.3 million .fr names registered, making .fr the 16th largest TLD.

The number of registrations is growing rapidly with 300,000 more registrations in 2008, a 36 per cent year-on-year increase which compares favourably to an average of around 20 per cent increase across all TLDs. A large part of this increase can be accredited to a liberalisation in the registration rules for .fr names in 2004. … more

ICANN is pleased to release an updated draft Implementation Plan for the IDN ccTLD fast track process [PDF, 265K]. The updated document contains clarifying information about the notion of IDN tables. … more

An estimated 281,000 domain names held by EstDomains will be transferred to ICANN-accredited registrar Directi Internet Solutions following the termination of EstDomains’ registrar accreditation yesterday.

Customers of EstDomains will be contacted directly by Directi and receive notice of the transfer plus instructions for continued management of their names. There will be no cost to the registrants for this transfer. … more

According to Anti-Phishing Alliance of China, by October 30, 2008 it had suspended the domain names of more than 300 Chinese phishing websites with the help of the anti-phishing system based on the .CN domain names reports ChinaTechNews.com. … more

In early 2009, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) plans to adopt the update for international domain names discussed since the beginning of this year reports Heise. The issue was discussed at the IETG meeting in Minneapolis last week. The report notes there were ongoing discussions “up until the last moment” on the “extent to which registries should be allowed to determine their own special language characteristics and how to use them.” … more

Whether the IETF should use its resources to encourage DNS registries, ISPs and enterprises to upgrade to the ultimate DNS security solution, DNSSEC, or whether it should tweak the DNS protocols to address the so-called Kaminsky bug as an interim step is being debated at a meeting of the IETF held in Minneapolis last week reports Network World. … more

[news release] The .CO.NL Grandfather phase opened successfully yesterday at 10:00 am GMT and the first day of registrations has shown some great interest in the new extension. The numerous official registrars that partner with the Operator have already submitted a high number of requests and the numbers will increase in the coming days. … more

An initiative to encourage Australian localities to develop websites that represent their community has reached its 100th domain name registration with Talgarno, a town in the state of Victoria, reaching the milestone. … more

The October 2008 issue of ‘The Browser’, InternetNZ’s monthly newsletter, is out now. Issues covered include: … more

When the government talks about “critical national infrastructure”, for most of us it brings to mind images of guarded nuclear facilities, choked railways and failing banks. But now, on a business park on the outskirts of Oxford, a keystone of the modern economy is the subject of an increasingly bitter power struggle that could trigger a Whitehall power grab at the independent heart of the UK internet. … more

by Hillary Elmore, Brandon Stephens & L. Jean Camp [Indiana University Bloomington - School of Informatics]

Abstract: In the near term there will be no available, unallocated IPv4 addresses. From original estimates of IPv4 exhaustion in 2037, the most widely-cited current estimates for ARIN IPv4 address depletion is now at 2013. This deadline gives a particular importance to IPv6 adoption. The goals of this work were to identify valid measures of IPv6 diffusion and use classic diffusion models to bound the uncertainty in those measures. … more

As from December 2008, DENIC and the DENIC members will make available a new procedure to domain holders who want to change their provider. The central feature of this new procedure is the transmission of a password, which is called AuthInfo. The AuthInfo is valid exclusively for this specific action and is related to one specific domain. … more