Régis Massé, Director of Information Systems and Chief Technical Officer at Afnic, the registry that manages the .fr ccTLD and 5 French overseas TLDs, was appointed Chair of the TLD-Ops Standing Committee for the ICANN ccNSO group.
The committee is composed of the majority of IT and security managers for country-code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) operators. Their goal is to detect and handle security incidents that could impact the stability of the Internet at local and global level.
At an ICANN meeting – the international organisation regulating the use of IP addresses and domain names used on the Internet – in Istanbul in November 2024, the TLD-Ops Standing Committee elected Régis Massé, Afnic Director of Information Systems and Chief Technical Officer, as its Chair. He succeeds Jacques Latour (CIRA). Régis Massé previously held the position of TLD-OPS Vice Chair for six years.
The TLD-OPS Standing Committee is the incident response community for and by ccTLD operators. The goal of the TLD-OPS community is to enable ccTLD operators worldwide to detect and mitigate incidents that may affect the security and stability of ccTLD services, such as DDoS attacks, malware infections, and phishing attacks. The aim of TLD-OPS is to further extend members’ existing incident response structures, processes, and tools and not to replace them. It runs workshops and publishes handbooks for registries with limited resources to enable them to establish operational action plans and appropriate counter-measures.
The TLD-OPS community currently covers over 70% of all ccTLDs and is set up under ICANN’s ccNSO (Country-Code Names Supporting Organization).
Afnic is a long-standing member of the ccNSO, which is responsible for developing and recommending global policies to the ICANN Board for a limited set of issues relating to ccTLDs.
As the new Chair, Régis Massé wishes to continue the efforts of recent years, including providing support for national registries, producing operations deliverables (best practices guides, attack response simulation workshops) and providing a forum for the sharing of sensitive information in confidence within the community.
About Afnic
Afnic is the acronym for Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération, the French Network Information Centre. The registry has been appointed by the French government to manage domain names under the .fr Top Level Domain. Afnic also manages the .re (Reunion Island), .pm (Saint-Pierre and Miquelon), .tf (French Southern and Antarctic Territories), .wf (Wallis and Futuna) and .yt (Mayotte) French Overseas TLDs.
In addition to managing French TLDs, Afnic’s role is part of a wider public interest mission, which is to contribute on a daily basis, thanks to the efforts of its teams and its members, to a secure and stable internet, open to innovation and in which the French internet community plays a leading role. As part of that mission, Afnic, a non-profit organization, has committed to devoting 11% of its Revenues from managing .fr Top Level Domain to actions of general interest, in particular by transferring €1.3 million each year to the Afnic Foundation for Digital Solidarity.
Afnic is also the back-end registry for the companies as well as local and regional authorities that have chosen to have their own TLD, such as .paris, .bzh, .alsace, .corsica, .mma, .ovh, .leclerc and .sncf.
Established in 1997 and based in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Afnic currently has nearly 90 employees.
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