[Community-Discuss] [rpd] Controversial anti-shutdown policy discussed at RIPE

[Mark Elkins]

With regard to the damage a shutdown can do:

Many of you will know that I am part of a team who has put together a
Paper on behalf of ICANN - the project which we call the African DNS
Market Study. This includes getting ccTLD stats from all African
countries. Because of the difficulty of getting responses from the whole
of the African ccTLD community, we also draw upon what other researchers
have done. We did our first count back in November, 2016.

One Data Source we used was DomainTools:
http://research.domaintools.com/statistics/tld-counts/

We repeated the exercise a week ago (6/7th May 2017) to see what had
changed. As expected, almost all ccTLD Domain counts have increased and
a handful have gone down by a very small margin.

There was one glaring exception, Cameroon.

November 2016:  63,023

May 2017:             31,801

That is, over the period of the Cameroon shutdown, the number of domains
registered under .CM decreased by more than 50%

That is significant.


-- 
Mark James ELKINS  -  Posix Systems - (South) Africa
mje at posix.co.za       Tel: +27.128070590  Cell: +27.826010496
For fast, reliable, low cost Internet in ZA: https://ftth.posix.co.za