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Coronavirus helps .nl beat 6 million regs

Kevin Murphy, July 7, 2020, Domain Registries

Dutch ccTLD .nl passed the six-million-domains milestone recently due in part to a surge in registrations during coronavirus lockdown.

According to SIDN, the registry, the six millionth domain was deyogiclub.nl and it was registered June 18.

According to my data, .nl has grown by about 100,000 domains since the start of 2020, and by about 80,000 names in the second quarter.

SIDN said (Google-translated from the original Dutch):

The number of registrations rose so rapidly during the corona crisis in recent months that the 6 million .nl domain registrations were reached much earlier than expected on the basis of the growth development.

The Netherlands entered its strongest period of lockdown March 15 and started easing restrictions in mid-May.

Coronavirus lockdown is working out great for at least one registry

Kevin Murphy, April 23, 2020, Domain Registries

The Dutch ccTLD registry has revealed that its volume of new registrations has been growing rapidly since the Netherlands implemented its coronavirus lockdown measures.

“Since the measures came into effect, Dutch entrepreneurs and private individuals registered over 85,000 .nl domain names, 10,000 more than in the same period in 2019,” SIDN said today (translated from the Dutch by Google).

Only about 2% to 3% of these names relate directly to the pandemic, the registry said.

There were 5,930,715 .nl domains registered as of April 20, an increase of about 17,000 from the start of the month.

A survey of registrants carried out for SIDN found that 100% of them intended to use their domains for online-only activities, as opposed to using them to promote a bricks-and-mortar business, for the first time.

SIDN’s good luck may not be shared by all in the industry, however.

ICANN, which is funded by a tax on registration fees, is to host a call next week in which it will explain how it will have to adapt its budget to respond to the impact of the pandemic.

If we take Verisign’s .com as a benchmark, its zone file has grown by roughly 383,000 domains since the end of March. In the same period last year, the increase was 434,000.

Tonight, Verisign is due to report its first-quarter numbers, and no doubt we will get some color on how its bosses think the virus will affect the market.

Norway bans the Dutch from using dormant .bv

Kevin Murphy, June 23, 2016, Domain Registries

The Norwegian government has intervened to prevent a deal that would have allowed the sale of .bv domain names in the Netherlands.
Norwegian ccTLD registry Norid and Dutch counterpart SIDN said a deal to start using the dormant ccTLD fell apart after the government exercised its right of veto under Norway’s domain regulations.
.bv represents Bouvet Island, the remotest island in the world. It’s a Norwegian territory in the Antarctic, uninhabited but for seals.
It’s been delegated to Norway since 1997, but has never been used.
But BV is also the Dutch acronym for “Besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid”, a corporate identifier that has pretty much the same meaning as “Ltd” or “LLC”.
Clearly, there was an opportunity to make a bit of extra pocket money for both registries, had SIDN been allowed to licence the use of the ccTLD, but the government intervention has scuppered all that.
SIDN said it had planned to use .bv as “a platform for validated business data”, but that now it will try to implement that idea in .nl instead.

Amsterdam accepts pre-registrations for city gTLD

Kevin Murphy, May 8, 2012, Domain Registries

The City of Amsterdam has confirmed that it has joined the ranks of major international cities applying to ICANN for a new generic top-level domain.
It has commissioned local publishing company HUB Uitgevers to manage .amsterdam, along with its technical partner SIDN, the .nl ccTLD registry.
Unusually, the project has also already started accepting pre-registrations at its official site.
The ICANN application fees are being covered by the local government, but a City of Amsterdam spokesperson said it expects to make the money back from annual royalty payments from HUB.
The famously liberal tourist destination has about 1.2 million inhabitants, according to Wikipedia.