Afnic's 2025 review finds .fr registrations at a record 4.3m, with strong new domain creation and steady retention, even as competition from .com and shifting digital trends temper expectations for future growth in 2026 overall.
Unicorn firms lead in DNS-based security adoption, signaling technical maturity, while Global 2000 rely on enterprise registrars. Gaps in redundancy and brand protection expose supply chain risks as cyberattacks intensify across industries globally today.
A flawed abuse-response system shifts costs from perpetrators to intermediaries, overwhelming enforcement. The Trusted Notifier Network seeks to realign incentives, curb low-quality reporting, and restore efficiency by embedding trust, accountability, and cost redistribution.
GlobalBlock's expansion into China and Germany signals a shift from reactive brand protection to centralized prevention, as firms seek scalable, cost efficient defences against proliferating AI driven domain abuse worldwide amid a fragmented digital landscape.
A surge in AI startups has exposed a domain-name shortage as premium .ai addresses vanish. With ICANN's next round years away, legacy TLDs and repurposed namespaces are racing to capture unmet demand.
IPv4 scarcity turned regional internet registries from clerks into gatekeepers of a valuable resource. Yet liability caps remain trivial, leaving powerful institutions with little accountability and incentives for conflict and structural breakdown ahead.
Project Jake invites global DNS stakeholders to test JADDAR, a privacy-respecting framework for secure access to registration data, aiming to reduce regulatory fragmentation and modernise domain governance through collaborative, policy-aligned engineering solutions.
As the 2026 gTLD round opens, applicants face an overlooked geopolitical hazard: what happens if the registry or RIR underpinning their domain collapses under sanctions or war, leaving contracts stranded and accountability elusive.
With the NIS2 Directive now in effect, a new annex to ICANN contracts offers registries and registrars a practical, flexible path to Article 28 compliance. Early adoption has drawn international praise.
The domain industry in 2025 saw rapid consolidation, rising regulatory pressure, and a strategic pivot toward AI, trust infrastructure, and tokenization, reshaping domains from static web addresses into dynamic assets for digital identity and commerce.