There seems to be no update from ICANN on the MEAC 2023 study. Here are some of the latest January 2024 gTLD hosting market figures (the MEAC countries from the full set of country level hosting markets spreadsheet) from a monthly domain name statistics report that I publish. The grouping is by hoster (registrar and resellers) associated with the country and the Local field is the number of locally hosted websites and the External field is the number of websites hosted outside that country's IP ranges. The Sites figure is the total number of gTLD websites hosted on the country's IP ranges. Country - ccTLD - region -All gTLDs - Local - External - Sites United Arab Emirates ae AP 42,825 2,160 19,384 11,367 Afghanistan af AP 373 3 331 150 Bahrain bh AP 670 3 263 219 Algeria dz AF 12,601 1,157 10,764 1,406 Egypt eg AF 15,828 2,749 10,247 4,621 Iran ir AP 390,120 182,753 73,212 305,710 Iraq iq AP 1,728 182 1,369 514 Jordan jo AP 3,619 567 970 1,512 Kuwait kw AP 2,308 274 1,324 1,085 Lebanon lb AP 2,827 865 1,181 1,422 Libya ly AF 3,258 22 2,689 404 Morocco ma AF 33,069 8,467 16,105 9,292 Mauritania mr AF 13 1 0 9 Oman om AP 1,167 154 728 508 Pakistan pk AP 97,229 1,860 82,016 5,067 Palestine ps AP 846 404 279 1,038 Qatar qa AP 2,077 67 1,649 423 Saudi Arabia sa AP 32,992 1,872 27,675 4,648 Sudan sd AF 1,014 6 864 46 Somalia so AF 726 1 565 266 Syria sy AP 1,495 573 746 737 Tunisia tn AF 8,447 4,364 2,264 4,885 Turkey tr AP 1,630,854 1,150,503 104,895 1,253,638 Yemen ye AP 320 0 305 179 The sheer vandalism of GDPR on the WHOIS has made the WHOIS records far less reliable when it comes to determining the country of a registration than they were at the time of the previous MEAC study in 2015. Due to GDPR kicking in May 2018, many of the gTLD registrations since then have critical data obscured or redacted. Most of the larger registrars automatically use WHOIS privacy. Some registrars actually provide no data even on the country fields. That's just the registrars. The registrants are far more creative on registration details and often put a completely different country for the registration. That's on some of the available records. From reading through the RFP (again), some of the ICANN requirements are worthy if a little on the optimistic side. Apart from major players like Turkey and Iran, a lot of registrations and websites are externally hosted on transnational registrars and hosting companies. Internet infrastructure, the importance of which was detailed in the draft Africa DNS Market Study 2023, plays a large part in where domain names are hosted. Globally, the reseller market share is approximately 21.98% of the gTLD market. Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com ********************************************************** -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com