CENTR

Presentation

The CENTR (Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries) was set up in May 1998, on the initiative of European country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registries. Its members are ccTLD managers in the wider European area. The CENTR is a British not-for-profit company based in Oxford.

The CENTR is a body that enables exchanges between top-level domain managers, and responds to the inherent need of domain name registries to be fuelled by the exchange of information.

Its role

The CENTR enables:

• coordination between the ccTLDs in the wider European area;
• experiences to be exchanged between ccTLD registries: growth in registration volumes, adaptation of tools, management of high volumes of data;
• an analysis of the legal issues relating to database content and to the regulations in force: the need to reconcile national regulations with those of the European Union, the internationalisation of Internet-specific media and the various experiences and approaches of the European registries;
• exchanges around the implementation of standards and best practices for the Internet;
• greater harmony in the formalisation of the working relationship between ccTLD and other organisations such as ICANN / IANA (service contracts, funding, technical coordination, root management, monitoring, etc...);
• exchanges on the setting up of ADR ("Alternative Dispute Resolution") procedures for the resolution of all domain name conflicts;
• exchanges on the deployment of emerging protocols: IDN, ENUM, DNSsec, IPv6, etc...

The registry function

A ccTLD registry registers domain names in a database, and publishes this database on the Internet using the DNS system. The publishing space for these names is represented by a two-letter code representing a country or a precise geographical area (for example .fr), and is defined in .

Management strategies and registration policies can vary greatly from one country to the next, which illustrates the diversity of the services demanded by "local Internet communities". And yet, the range of skills required by Internet domain name registries, and the constraints they are subject to, highlight the existence of highly specific function-related issues covering a wide range of activities (regulatory, technical, legal, administrative, legislative, etc...).

The promotion of AFNIC projects

The AFNIC, one of the co-founders of the CENTR, endeavours to promote the respect of intellectual property rights in Internet naming and actively participates in concrete operational exchanges between ccTLDs, in particular those based in Europe, which it seeks to stimulate (response to the call by the European Commission to manage the .eu registry EUREG, exchanges of secondary DNSs, technical monitoring of ccTLD naming, etc).

The CENTR's general meetings are held every two months or so, and administrative, legal and technical management working groups meet on a regular basis.
A representative from the European Union attends these general meetings as an observer. In addition, the European Union regularly organises consultation meetings in Brussels, with representatives from the Member States and European ccTLDs.

CENTR website

Calendar of CENTR meetings