As 2024 draws to a close, we reflect on a year of many changes and developments.

Markmonitor Celebrated its 25th Anniversary

In 2024, Markmonitor celebrated its silver anniversary. For 25 years, we’ve been the premier corporate domain registrar, providing exceptional service and solutions to our customers and clients. We look forward to another 25 years and more of serving the needs of businesses around the globe, engaging in Internet policy, developing new products, and being at the forefront of the industry. I saw my 10-year anniversary at Markmonitor this year, and it’s been fantastic to see our growth and development over time.

Expanding Teams at Markmonitor

Within the Global Industry Relations (GIR) team, we saw the addition of Leanne Kenny, who you may recognise from her previous role at the UK registry, Nominet. Markmonitor was also proud and excited to announce the addition of the talented Bonnie Wittenburg to our business to provide strategic guidance to our biggest clients.

Webinars, Industry Reports, and Expanding Thought Leadership in APAC

The GIR department expanded into international webinars with our first forays into APAC content led by Heidi Zhang, and we brought new clarity and insights to ongoing reports with Chris Niemi’s quarterly gTLD Report and Shane Layman’s introduction of a Web3 Report, ensuring that we are sharing the latest developments taking place in the sector. 

Domain Dynamics In-Person Events

Thought leadership aside, 2024 saw the return of in-person events with our Domain Dynamics series, taking place in New York, London, and San Jose. These events brought our clients together from far and wide to discuss the challenges they face and share thoughts about the future of domain management. Thank you to all who were able to join us and contribute to the immensely successful return to in-person events. We are incredibly excited to continue this series next year. 

It would be amiss not to start without a reference to AI, as 2024 saw the movements toward legal definitions and prohibited AI practices with the EU’s AI Act. 2024 also saw more innovative integration of AI into registrars’ service offerings, from “chatbots” to registration process flow to domain name generators. We also witnessed the rise of LLM (or Large Language Models) being used in Brand Protection Services and the identification of abusive registrations. This trend will definitely be increasing in 2025. And the excitement and developments didn’t end there, with the TLD for Anguilla (.ai) seeing exponential growth and development, increasing from a total of ~350,000 registrations in December 2023 to over 500,000 this year. With a planned migration of technical infrastructure over to Identity Digital, we shall be hearing far more about AI as a topic and .ai as a TLD in 2025.

Policy, Directive, and Regulation Developments in 2024 

2024 was a year of external impacts. We saw further legislative impacts as the NIS2, The Network and Information Systems Directive 2, transposition deadline passed in October 2024, with many a member state missing this deadline and some still indicating not having started the transposition process. NIS2 demonstrates another key theme, which I believe we will see more of in 2025 and beyond, and that is regulation via legislation. NIS1 (NIS2’s predecessor), saw the identification of Operators of Essential Services and the creation of security infrastructure requirements and obligations); GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, empowered individuals’ rights to protect their display of personal identifying information via the Whois database; and the DSA, the Digital Services Act, created obligations and responsibilities for platforms. These acts, directives, and regulations are all good, demonstrative illustrations of how this trend will continue to grow in 2025. With more transposition for NIS2 on the horizon for many European member states, we shall look at even more impacts of this legislation in 2025.  

Policies and Solutions Impacting Domain Portfolio Holders

This year saw shifts in registration policies for portfolio holders, with domain blocking services like GlobalBlock being utilised more strategically and aligned more closely to business needs and budgets. In 2024, we saw many clients engaging more strategically with domain blocking solutions, especially as blocks covered a greater number of extensions and included more coverage across both ccTLDs and gTLDs. Speaking of strategies, 2024 saw the trend of ccTLD and gTLD partnerships — with several ccTLDs opting for gTLD Registry infrastructure. We anticipate much more of this for 2025. 

Markmonitor also took its partnership with Dataprovider.com to the next level and introduced Markmonitor Portfolio Insights, a comprehensive monitoring tool to provide actionable, regular insights into organizations’ domain portfolios and online presences.

We know that 2025 will be a big year for implementing changes. WHOIS will be sunsetting, and we shall see the global roll-out of the Registration Data Access Protocol, or RDAP. We shall also witness the next developments for RDRS, the Registration Data Request Service, and what the future of standardised requests for registrant data looks like. 2025 will see the implementation of the Registrant Data Policy as well.

2024 saw the DNS abuse amendments be implemented as registries and registrars made proactive steps in the fight against DNS abuse. ICANN saw the roll-out of their Domain Metrica tool, providing insights to accredited registrars, including volume of domains, volumes of phishing, malware, and spam (which proved to be quite controversial).  

Changes in ICANN Leadership

2024 marked the end of the term for interim CEO, Sally Costerton (and what a wonderful job she did), and Q4 of this year saw the new CEO, Kurtis Lindqvist, take the helm to usher in a new wave of leadership for ICANN alongside the registries and registrars, who also saw change — many congratulations to Beth Bacon and Owen Smigelski. 2025 shall see new leadership, new directions, and new attitudes throughout the ICANN-sphere. And with Board Seat 12 and 13 also being voted for in 2024 and 2025, we can expect to see even more change and developments with leadership at ICANN. At least one thing will not change — Markmonitor will continue our work at the GNSO Council, having successfully won an election earlier this year.

The Next Round of New gTLDs Approaches

We cannot mention ICANN without mentioning one of the biggest developments, which is on its way, and that is the Next Round. 2024 saw healthy skepticism relating to timings and timelines with regard to whether 2026 will be “the year.” With both the RSP (Registry Service Provider) pre-evaluation application submission period opening on time as well as the Applicant Support Program application submission period also opening on time, the projected dates and timelines appear to be on course. 2024 saw a lot of outreach from ICANN, and registries and registrars alike started important discussions to prepare applicants for what is to come and also future-proof their plans. Chris Niemi, Manager of Strategic Initiatives at Markmonitor, along with Crews Gore, President of the Brand Registry Group, conducted an engaging, informative webinar earlier this year discussing the practicalities of running a .Brand, the importance of having a “.Brand Champion,” and the hurdles and obstacles and organization may face during the application process. For the Next Round, the application process will no longer entertain private auctions or closed generics — 2026 is going to be very interesting and we shall discuss this topic much more during the next year. 

Markmonitor Policy and Engagement in the Domain Industry

In 2024, policy groups and engagement were big themes for Markmonitor. This year, we added the TCCM (Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism) to our memberships and associations. You can expect us to discuss multistakeholderism much more next year. Markmonitor also joined the Board for i2Coalition to help recentre and refocus our efforts on policy development. Not content with one board seat, this year, we also joined the board for the Swedish Internet Foundation, the registry for .se. We continued our work with the PIR Advisory Council (PIRAC) and got to engage and participate in the fantastic .org Impact Awards, meeting some incredible mission-driven organisations and seeing what positive changes can be facilitated through domain names. Markmonitor engaged globally this year, with members of the GIR Team attending TMAP, INTA AGM, ICANN meetings, China Intellectual Property Annual Conference, APAC DNS Forum, as well as the WTR Live and Brand Strategy Summit Asia. 

We Look Forward to 2025

2024 was an incredibly successful year for the Markmonitor team, and it was a great year for our sector with so many interesting developments and changes. As we move into 2025, I want to take the opportunity to thank you for staying with us for another year, trusting us to keep you informed of what’s happening in the domain industry, and encourage you to to stay tuned as we provide even more developments in 2025.