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On February 12-13, 2020, the 63rd CENTR General Assembly was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which was attended by over 70 representatives of CENTR member ccTLD registries. The participants attending the meeting discussed issues related to cooperation and joint response to negative industry trends as well as the implementation of several projects in order to collectively respond to changes in the environment such as the introduction of new technologies (DoH, IoT) or new EU legislative initiatives (EU Cybersecurity Act). </p>
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Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ experts took part in the assembly. Coordination Center Deputy Director Irina Danelia spoke about the pilot project on the authorization and identification of domains using the United Authorization and Identification System (UAIS) used at the Government Services. The project was implemented by the Coordination Center and RU-CENTER in 2019.</p>
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Danelia noted that increasing the authenticity of domain administrators’ registration contact data would be one of the most important tasks of the project. Automatically checking the data format before registration or using it to check official databases were one way to decrease the number of deficient or incorrect data. Some European gTLDs already implement such checks.</p>
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An interesting presentation was made by Patrick Myles, CENTR. He said that over the last year both the global and European domain market hadn’t seen any significant growth, while the European ccTLDs showed positive growth in general: 2.4 percent per year, with certain domains showing great results (such as .UK, 11.4 percent). It is noteworthy that unlike the total market the European domain market was not much influenced by new gTLDs. The average registration fee in Europe is 13.6 euros. In general, the European domain market has been demonstrating stability and sustainability in recent years.</p>
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“CENTR’s statistical research is always carried out at a very high level and provides information for analysis and thinking, in order to apply it and base the domestic marketing policy on it. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ takes an active part in most of the CENTR research, and some of it, for example, the research on data authenticity on the list, was held at the initiative of our registry,” Andrey Vorobyev said commenting on the report.</p>
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In addition, the participants at the assembly met the new ICANN Vice President for Europe Chris Mondini. He personally came to the CENTR event to meet representatives of the European national registries and to tell them about ICANN’s next plans for the region. The participants also elected three new members of the Board and the new CENTR Board Chair. For the first time it is a woman: Head of the Slovenian national registry Barbara Povse. The assembly participants also approved the 2019 financial report and discussed several administrative issues.</p>
