Good morning all, I was reading through the FY24 Regional action plan. The MEAC DNS Industry study is listed as having RFP and evaluation dates in 2023 with publication dates in early 2024. There has been no announcement from ICANN on the evaluation of proposals, the award of the contract or the MEAC DNS report itself. Did the 2023 ICANN MEAC DNS study ever go ahead? The RFP document from 2023 was interesting in that it seemed to be a wishlist that did not take into consideration how the industry has changed since the 2015 ICANN MEAC DNS study. Even reading the RFP from 2015 shows how different the requirements were from the complexities of the market. The 2015 study hadn't a hope of providing some of information and statistics required in the RFP as there was a massive underestimation of the complexity of delivering what the RFP involved and the availability of some of the data. One of the things of which both RFPs did not take into account was the rate at which the hosting market changes. It changes every month with new resellers entering the market and resellers leaving. Change also happens at a registrar level. Some of the requirements such as the market at an ICANN registrar level are trivial. Outside that, the reseller markets and the ccTLD markets are much more difficult to measure even with the necessary data. The best that could be achieved with those RFPs, even if the vendors were able to deliver on all requirements, would be a snapshot of the current market. In the gTLDs, over 5.5 million new domain names were registered in April 2024 and over 5.2 million domain names were deleted. That's just in one month. Over a year, that's tens of millions of new and deleted domain names. The domain name industry is not a monolithic and unchanging one. It is more like a flowing river where up to 30% of a country's domain name hosting market in a TLD can change in a year due to new registrations, deletions and transfers. The 2015 market for the MEAC region is a different market to the 2023 market and the 2024 market. The biggest change since the 2015 study has been the unintended effect of the European Union's GDPR on somewhat reliable WHOIS data. Many gTLD domain names registered since May 2018 no longer have registrant data or even country data. WHOIS privacy is now the default on some of the larger registrars. The WHOIS service is also being replaced by RDAP. Despite results from various studies (pre-2018), the accuracy of WHOIS data varies considerably. Some of the larger registrars have been using default WHOIS privacy to stop their customers being spammed. This has also made the approach used by previous studies, including the 2015 study, highly problematic. This is what the MEAC gTLD hosting market looks like based on the 01/August/2024 gTLD zone files (legacy and new gTLDs). The number of gTLD domain names in the August 2024 survey was 219,695,890. This is a monthly survey of all gTLD domain names. All gTLDs Hosting Market (MEAC): Country - cc - Region - Domains - Local - External - Site IPs United Arab Emirates ae AP 41,586 4,757 17,112 80,879 Afghanistan af AP 269 0 238 89 Algeria dz AF 13,474 902 11,825 1,221 Bahrain bh AP 661 18 249 2,943 Egypt eg AF 16,118 2,896 10,336 5,535 Iraq iq AP 1,860 47 1,410 378 Iran ir AP 397,320 187,268 81,424 283,174 Jordan jo AP 3,045 533 913 1,472 Kuwait kw AP 2,355 291 1,310 1,095 Lebanon lb AP 2,591 857 953 1,403 Libya ly AF 3,385 258 2,508 280 Morocco ma AF 32,986 8,280 16,094 9,107 Mauritania mr AF 11 1 0 10 Oman om AP 1,263 159 782 530 Pakistan pk AP 127,891 1,629 111,352 3,646 Palestine ps AP 827 407 274 1,107 Qatar qa AP 1,909 62 1,538 536 Saudi Arabia sa AP 67,817 1,850 59,682 4,483 Sudan sd AF 1,384 1 1,218 44 Somalia so AF 954 1 789 156 Syria sy AP 1,474 528 772 713 Tunisia tn AF 8,233 4,365 2,105 4,921 Turkey tr AP 1,607,672 1,125,675 122,652 1,207,346 Yemen ye AP 254 6 222 200 The 'Domains' figure is the number of domain names hosted on webhosters associated with the country. This includes registrars and resellers. The 'Local' figure is the number of websites of those domain names on local registrars and resellers that are hosted on IP ranges associated with that country. The 'External' figure is the number of websites hosted outside that country's IP ranges. The 'Site IPs' figure is the number of websites hosted on that country's IP ranges. The reason that this may not match the Local figure is that a website may be using the DNS service of a webhoster outside the country but have an IP address associated with the country. The gTLD hosting market is tracked monthly as part of one of the monthly reports that I publish. The current resolution (grouping domain names with webhosters by country) is 98.49%. These figures are for the hosting market rather than the ICANN registrar market. Internet infrastructure affects hosting. The more developed the infrastructure, the more websites will be hosted locally. The ccTLDs are also part of the market and some MEAC ccTLDS are dominant in their market. These are the ICANN gTLD figures from April 2024: ICANN MEAC Registrars -All gTLDs (Legacy and New gTLDs) Country - cc - Region - Registrars - gTLDs - % United Arab Emirates AE AP 4 20,146 0.01% Iraq IQ AP 1 953 0.00% Jordan JO AP 1 919 0.00% Kuwait KW AP 1 1,992 0.00% Morocco MA AF 2 16,856 0.01% Pakistan PK AP 1 21,202 0.01% Tunisia TN AF 1 84 0.00% Turkey TR AP 8 1,766,212 0.76% ICANN MEAC Registrars New gTLDs Country - cc - Registrars - New gTLDs - % UAE ae 2 11,002 0.03% Iraq iq 1 533 0.00% Jordan jo 1 8 0.00% Kuwait kw 1 13 0.00% Morocco ma 2 699 0.00% Pakistan pk 2 63 0.00% Tunisia tn 1 0 0.00% Turkey tr 3 15,857 0.04% (Registrars figure is for active registrars. A registrar can be accredited for a gTLD but have no domain names under management.) In terms of registrations, Turkey is the largest player in the region followed by Iran. Much of the gTLD registration activity of countries in the region are outsourced to registrars in other countries. This is not uncommon and the reseller share of the gTLD market is approximately 21.71%. These are domain names that are not hosted on registrar nameservers. At a webhosting level, the gTLD market is even more complex. The nameservers with the largest number of gTLD domain names hosted are Godaddy's domaincontrol.com nameservers. The domain names that use those nameservers are hosted on over 1,645 webhosters. Some registrars have their own dedicated webhosting operations and also use Cloud hosting. Large registrars can have webhosting operations in various regions. The one inescapable issue for countries with developing Internet infrastructure is that it is often cheaper to register and host outside that country's Internet infrastructure. The gTLD markets in most of the countries with developing infrastructures are almost completely reseller based. A reseller is a business that resells the registration and hosting services of a registrar or webhoster. In gTLD terms, every business that is not an accredited ICANN registrar and is selling these registration services is a reseller. For the gTLDs, there are approximately 118,192 of them with ten or more gTLD domain names hosted. With a five domain name cut-off, the figure rises to 186,415. That's only on the basis of nameservers. Some resellers use the services of retail registrars who provide "registration as a service" covering a gTLDs and ccTLDs. Identifying these resellers is slightly more difficult. Relying only on ICANN's gTLD registrar figures for the size of a country's or region's market gives a very misleading view of the market because ICANN doesn't provide the country-level breakdown of registrants. The MEAC hosting market for new gTLDs is quite different to that of the ICANN MEAC registrar market. New gTLD Hosting Market MEAC: Country - cc - Domains - Local - External - Site IPs UAE ae 13,214 338 1,281 19,174 Afghanistan af 33 0 32 4 Bahrain bh 22 7 9 708 Algeria dz 389 21 319 98 Egypt eg 358 74 179 284 Iraq iq 180 10 47 67 Iran ir 33,258 8,931 5,986 31,690 Jordan jo 191 30 23 121 Kuwait kw 229 17 50 84 Lebanon lb 112 41 23 68 Libya ly 149 4 31 7 Morocco ma 1,911 361 693 554 Mauritania mr 0 0 0 2 Oman om 55 5 48 34 Pakistan pk 33,225 21 29,725 256 Palestine ps 58 18 19 77 Qatar qa 87 0 62 51 Saudi Arabia sa 1,308 26 1,065 220 Sudan sd 79 0 57 2 Somalia so 10 0 4 3 Syria sy 23 11 10 32 Tunisia tn 212 80 73 144 Turkey tr 261,765 208,045 9,541 212,213 Yemen ye 18 0 15 20 The rise of Cloud hosting and CDNs has also impacted the MEAC market. The largest players are Amazon, Cloudflare, Microsoft. Cloudflare nameservers had 17,451,025 gTLD domain names as of 01/August/2024. Some of those are MEAC domain names and websites. The MEAC market is also heavily interdependent with some countries providing registration and webhosting services for adjacent countries. Most of the domain names on MEAC hosters are in legacy (.COM/NET/ORG etc) gTLDs and the new gTLDs have not had a major impact. The .COM is still the biggest gTLD in the market for historical and pricing reasons though this may change as gTLD registration fees increase. The biggest competition to the legacy gTLDs is not from the new gTLDs but rather from the ccTLDs. There's a registrar issue too. It is often cheaper for a hosting business to become an accredited ccTLD registrar than become an accredited ICANN registrar. Some MEAC countries have no ICANN accredited registrars so all their gTLD registration activity is outsourced. This makes it difficult for prospective MEAC ICANN registrars to gain market share. The typical development path is that a reseller builds up enough regisrations so that becoming an ICANN registrar makes economic sense. The problem with that, for ICANN, is that it is cheaper to become a ccTLD registrar and most of the local market identifies with the ccTLD being their TLD in a way that .COM is not. In the last twenty years, there has been a shift away from gTLDs to ccTLDs in many country level markets as the local ccTLD becomes the most popular (First Choice TLD) TLD in the country's market. The .COM is still the top global TLD for export. But as the ccTLD and local Internet usage grows in a country, people increasingly use the local ccTLD for their websites, e-mail and businesses. There is a tipping point where the First Choice TLD switches from .COM to the local ccTLD. After that, the new registrations volume in the ccTLD begins to outpace that in the gTLDs. The IDNs might provide some possibilites for growth in the MEAC market. It would be possible to break the gTLD figures above down by IDNs. The main market for IDNs could be in the local ccTLDs rather than gTLDs. There were 782,442 IDN domain names in .COM on 01/August/2024. There were 154,946,557 active .COM domain names. The future for IDNs is more likely to be in the ccTLDs than the gTLDs even if some new gTLDs are purely IDN. 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