Domain name “.MA”: The most important project of the National Agency for Transportation Regulation for this year

Cybersecurity was on the agenda at the annual meeting on .ma domain names, which took place on April 6th. The meeting organized by the National Telecommunications Regulatory Agency and the General Directorate of Information Systems Security (DGSSI) allowed discussions on the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic on the Domain Name Ecosystem (DNS).

This year, several projects related to .ma domain names will be implemented by the National Agency for Telecommunications Regulation (ANRT). Beginning with reviewing the decision that defines the conditions for their management. Entry into force on March 1, 2015, Resolution ANRT / DG / N ° 12/14 of November 21, 2014 defines administrative, technical and commercial management procedures for domain names “.ma”.

“This decision will be reviewed in 2021, on the one hand, to make improvements to some of the current processes for managing .ma domain names, and to support the management of domain names in Arabic script, anywhere else,” ANRT said.

The registration of domain names in Arabic characters will also be open to the public. It should be noted that during the year 2020, the National Transportation Regulation Agency launched a process for pre-registration of domain names in Arabic letters in accordance with international practices in this regard. It will be established at the national level in order to strengthen the protection of the industrial and industrial fields. Commercial property rights in the “.ma” DNS. The National Agency for Transportation Regulation also plans to expand the scope of dispute settlement, currently reserved for trademarks protected in Morocco, to include other issues, including in particular the company name, geographical indications and appellations of origin, including the national registers maintained by Moroccan industrial and commercial property. Office (Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property).

Indeed, it is envisaged that an additional procedure would be created at the national level, in addition to the current procedure, administered by the Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property Arbitration Center. In cooperation with the Directorate General of Information Systems Security (DGSSI) and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), ANRT planned to organize a fourth training session on the DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) protocol, for the benefit of the banking sector. Indeed, this protocol represents an additional component of the online protection needed to protect a national top-level ccTLD (such as “.ma”), and to protect domain names registered under the same top-level code domain. The purpose of this training is to provide participants with the technical skills necessary to implement this protocol that makes it possible to overcome weaknesses in the DNS (Domain Name System) protocol. Also, a symposium on the topic of “DNS abuse” should be organized in April 2021 by ANRT, in cooperation with DGSSI and ICANN. The purpose of this event is to provide tools and techniques for analyzing abuse of the DNS, including malicious registration of domain names.

Inventory of “.ma” domain names
Thanks to the health crisis and its major impact on digital transformation and the acceleration of the digitization of companies, the number of Internet domain names under the “.ma” extension includes 93,506 websites in operation, an increase of 19.37% over a year. In the fourth quarter of 2020, 8,177 new domain names were registered. According to ANRT, this trend can be explained mainly by the simplicity of the web address within the “.ma” extension. With an average renewal rate of 81%, .ma domain names ranked second in the MENA region, in terms of park size, after the United Arab Emirates (221,000 domain name owners) and ahead of Saudi Arabia (72,635) and Tunisia. (47806) and Algeria (12840). In terms of geographic location, 88% of holders of .ma domain names are established in Morocco, while the remaining 12% are distributed between France, the United States of America, China and Spain. Of the stable holders in Morocco, 49% are in Casablanca (compared to 50.6% in 2019). However, the National Transportation Regulation Agency deplores the fact that most holders of “.ma” domain names do not register and renew their names over a period of several years. By way of illustration, during 2019, 93.6% of domain names were renewed for only one year. Faced with this observation, the National Agency for Regulation of Transportation (ANRT) recommends that owners register their domain name and renew it over a period of several years in order to avoid deletion in the event that they forget to renew annually. In fact, non-renewable domain names are automatically deleted from the registry 30 days after they expire. The average life of a .ma domain name is 5.4 years. Almost 63% have a lifespan of less than 6 years.

The global domain name market.
At the end of September 2020, the global domain name market had approximately 370.7 million domain names under various extensions. These are generic “.com” and “.net” extensions delegated by ICANN to various entities, and country or territory extensions of type “.ma” for Morocco or “.tn” for Tunisia, delegated under the ISO-3166 standard. In the statistics, the generic extensions “.com” and “.net” remain largely at the top of the ranking, with 163.7 million domain names registered worldwide. The .tk extension of Little Tokelau Atoll, a 10-square-kilometer autonomous region in New Zealand, ranks first in country extensions and second in Internet domains in the world with 27.5 million users. de “and the British” .uk “. This explains the fact that the extension was one of the first extensions to be offered for free. Enough to make it a tropical paradise for cyber crooks and a financial blessing for Tokelau. In Morocco, the generic term most used in .ma domain names is” store ” In practice, doubling the terms “service” and “consulting”, no matter how widely their use is. By focusing on general terms related to the main sectors of activity, the following areas of use are distinguished from .ma domain names: Consulting services, with terms “ Consulting, “conseil” and “company”; tourism, with the terms “hotel”, “club”, “excursion”, and “tourism”; communication and advertising services, with the terms “pub”, “media” and “radio”; communications Wired and wireless and new information and communication technology, with the terms “internet”, “web”, “telecommunications” and “digital”; financial services, in the terms “bank”, “bank”, “finance”; and real estate services, with the terms “real estate” and ” Imo. “

ANRT Recommendations
In the face of the above and the risks of cyberattacks managed by domain name holders, ANRT makes several recommendations: protect your domain name by registering it with the service provider declared to the regulatory authority, ensuring that the information related to its domain name registration is updated with the service provider, protecting the name Its domain is accented by registering it to avoid the risk of cybersquatting, or even secure its domain name via the DNSSEC protocol. For owners of sensitive domain names, it is recommended to lock the domain name with the service provider, announce its domain name with at least two separate DNS servers, provide its servers with IPv6 addresses plus IPv4 addresses, and announce its domain name with at least two separate MX servers and a distributor On different network sectors and geographical points.

Modest Kwame / Environmental inspiration