This year, the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) marks its 20th anniversary. The project was founded in 1998 and legally established as a not-for-profit company a year later. Today the association has 54 full members, including the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, and 9 associate members. Another 12 organizations have observer status. CENTR’s work is crucial for the operation of national domains, which have recently become an increasingly important and dynamically developing part of the global domain space.
In the run-up to the anniversary, the official CENTR website ran a series of articles and interviews that describe the road traveled. According to Barbara Povse Golob, head of the Slovenian national domain registry, Register.si, 20 years ago the role of the registry was exclusively technical and the situation has changed dramatically today. “Technically a domain name still counts as an address, but it is much more – a brand, a digital identity, statement, sometimes a tool for abuse,” she says. “20 years ago I couldn’t predict… that lawyers would become one of the most important and the busiest employees of the Registry.” Hirofumi Hotta, director of Japan Registry Services (JPRS, associate member of CENTR), agrees with her. “Registries generally thought and still basically think that they just manage the database of the domain name registration, serve DNS zone files under their management, and they are not involved in the usage of the domain names or in the content navigated by the domain names. However, users are becoming more and more demanding that registries should do whatever they can do to solve/mitigate problems/troubles on the internet,” he notes. Hirofumi Hotta also thinks it is becoming important to attract young people to the domain name business.
The publications also emphasize the crucial role played by CENTR educational and statistical materials in raising awareness of the current situation in the domain space and in forming strategic plans for registries of national domains. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and CENTR have rich experience in fruitful cooperation. The СС’s projects have been nominated several times for CENTR awards. In general, their cooperation shows that the internet knows no boundaries, and the work to improve it cannot be influenced by any momentary political trends.
Deputy Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Irina Danelia has sat on the Board of Directors of CENTR for four years. “Collaboration has been at the core of CENTR's activities for all these 20 years. Our cooperation and the willingness of all CENTR registries to share their experience and best practices helps the association develop very interesting projects. For example, for its 20th anniversary, the CENTR association has released a series of articles devoted to the study of processes occurring in the domain market. At the initiative of the Coordination Center, part of these studies has been translated into Russian and published on the CC website. On CENTR’s anniversary, I would like to express confidence that we will continue working together, drawing on the experience and support of our colleagues from different registries,” Irina Danelia said.
