by Calvin Korenhof
On September 16th, the annual Day of the Domain Name took place, hosted by the Association of Registrars. As always, the day was action-packed with presentations, panel discussions, and catching up with new and familiar faces.
State of the Industry
The presentations kicked off with the “State of the Industry” provided by the Association’s chairman and Realtime Register’s CEO, Berend van Dalfzen. The presentation provided a YoY overview of the domain industry, and closed with the question: “In this age of AI, will domains evolve or go extinct?”
The .COM domain still dominates the market with 157.9m of the total 371.7m domain name registrations across all TLDs, followed by .NET. The ccTLD registrations are dominated by .CN and .DE. Our national ccTLD .NL is the 5th most popular ccTLD and 8th most popular across all TLDs.
The embracement of AI and its ever-growing potential has been noticed by many people, and I think that everyone reading this article falls in that category. This potential has also reached the domain industry. Especially to the extent that it becomes easier for customers to utilize AI for website or webshop creation using tools like Basekit. And what do people need with a website to further strengthen their brand? A domain name.
Keynote by Bert Hubert
The second speaker, tech-expert Bert Hubert spoke about the importance of protecting the European infrastructure and providing European alternatives to the large cloud-providers from The United States. The vast majority of data vital to continuation of present Europe’s operations goes through US based companies. For example, the Dutch government uses the services of US based company Microsoft.
There was a clear call to become less dependent from the overseas territories, and that the European hosting and domain industries should work together to strengthen the position and services to compete and provide European based hosting and DNS alternatives to their US counterparts.
There are existing European hosting solutions, like our colleague associates from the Dutch Cloud Community, as well as the German based STACKIT and the French based OVHcloud. Realtime Register provides a DNS service, backed by Austrian based RcodeZero.
Interviews & panels
There were a number of interviews with industry veterans and experts, including:
- Internet.nl, discussing modern internet standards.
- SIDN foundation director Valerie Frissen, discussing the foundation, its goals and plans.
- A panel discussion regarding the NIS2 legislation, including .EU registry EURid, Belgian registrar bNamed and Realtime Register’s own Theo Geurts. Discussing the upcoming NIS2 legislations, the requirements and the challenges.
To conclude
It was a successful day with plenty of room for inspiration, new knowledge and networking. Don’t want to miss the next edition? Send us a message and we’ll be sure to inform you of future updates!