MEAC DNS Study

The Middle East and Adjoining Countries (MEAC) DNS Study 2015 analyzes the MEAC region's domain name industry and registration data as it relates to the larger global internet environment. MEAC contains a structured survey of ccTLD registries in the region, supplemented with interviews with registries and registrars, and also offers suggested actions to stimulate wider uptake in the region.

The recommendation to conduct this study was one of the outcomes of the Middle East Engagement Strategy, which was developed by a group of community members in the region, and defined three strategic focus areas for the region. One of those focus areas, which was to develop the region's domain name industry, is covered by this study.

ICANN first called for proposals for the study in March 2015, and requested that reports be submitted no later than October 9th. In June 2015, the .eu registry, EURid, was selected by ICANN to conduct the study.

General Findings

Regional Differences

• Across the region as a whole, 31% of users spend 3 hours or fewer per day online, but in some countries, people said they are online for more than 10 hours per day.
• Users have a strong preference for websites using local languages such as Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu when interacting with friends and government online, but English dominates the language of web content, with 71% of sites associated with the region (compared to 55% of global sites).
• Social media is on the uptake in the region, perhaps because difficulties in domain name registration make social media a faster channel to get online.

Domain Name Industry

• Only 1% of the world's registered domains are in the MEAC region. Only 3 ccTLDs in the region have higher than 10 domains per 1,000 inhabitants, which compares to 100-300 domains per 1,000 in other countries worldwide.
• Annual growth in domain name registrations is strong, at >20% per year. Growth is particularly strong in ccTLDs that have deregulated, such as .tn and .ma.
• There are 21,000 IDNs in the region, half of which are under .tr and half which are Arabic script -- but in general, uptake of IDNs is hampered by lack of universal acceptance.
• Hosting markets are strongly linked to domain name registration, and hosting across the region is weak, with the exception of Iran and Turkey. Only 5% of popular web content is hosted in the region, and many countries have strict legislation affecting internet content.
• Most international registrars who have modern platforms for end-users are not present in the region and are discouraged from involvement due to administrative barriers to registering domain names in the region, such as manual procedures or pre-registration checks.
• Most ccTLDs in the region are confined to their territory and have strict policies for registrar accreditation and domain name registration.
• End user awareness about internet domain names was quite high; nearly half the users surveyed knew what a domain name is. 40% typed domains directly into the navigation bar of their browser (compared with 35 % of global users), and nearly all users from the region check the domain name before clicking search results.

Recommendations

• Basic internet access issues need to be given priority. Local hosting markets must be strengthened.
• Policies and investment should focus on supporting eCommerce and local language content.
• Local TLD operators should liberalize policies, by making them more accessible, lowering fees, and making policies more transparent.
• Standarizing technical and operational systems will reduce coasts and encourage international registrars to support the region, which is essential to long-term growth.
• International registrars can intensify local competition by lowering retail prices and improving uptake.
• ccTLDs in the region should consider starter programmes and incentives to on-board new registrars at local level.
• Registries may also consider bundling domain names with add-on products such as forwarding services and services that assist customers in building websites.

MEAC Countries & the MEAC Environment

The region covered in the MEAC Study covers a large geographic expanse, from the Atlantic coast in the West to the Hindu Kush in the East. Linguistic diversity includes several languages sharing Arabic script, such as Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Dari, Pashto), and others (such as Turkish) written in Latin script.

At the request of ICANN, the MEAC DNS Study focuses deeply on the following countries:

• Egypt
• Jordan
• Lebanon
• Morocco
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• Tunisia
• United Arab Emirates
• Afghanistan
• Islamic Republic of Iran
• Pakistan
• Turkey

Research Methodology

The data presented in the MEAC DNS Study was gathered from a combination of:

• A specially-commissioned multi-country user survey
• Direct contact with ccTLD registries and registrars
• Data analysis of gTLD open zone files

Multi-Country User Survey

The users surveys were conducted in English, French, and Arabic, through a mixture of online forms and telephone interviews, and were administered by local companies and partners. 702 respondents in the MEAC region answered 24 questions on the user of online payment systems, online activities, and preferred languages. Though the sample size was large enough to draw tentative conclusions across the region as a whole, the small number of individuals per country does potentially distort results, as large shifts in percentage may come from relatively small movements of numbers.

ccTLD Registries and Registrars

ccTLDs in countries like Iran, Morocco, and Tunisia publicly publish their registration data, yet many of their statistics have only figures on the day consulted and lack historic or IDN data. Other registries in the region do not publish any statistics. Therefore, the MEAC DNS Study team, used existing resources and contacts from their ten-plus years of work in the ccTLD and IDN space. This included a long-term project called the EURid-UNESCO World Report on Internationalised Domain Names, as well as work with organizations like CENTR, LACTLD and APTLD. Therefore, the MEAC DNS Study benefit from these contacts; all ccTLD registration data in the study, including IDN data, either results from direct registry contact between June and September 2015, or from publicly available information from registry websites.

gTLD Open Zone Files

Entire Data Set
All gTLD and open zone file domains were captured in June 2015, producing about 156 million entries. For privacy purposes, the team avoided doing large-scale WHOIS lookups, and supplemented them only when unavoidable. They recorded the following metrics for each domain name:

• IP address of the domain name
• Web page status code for the domain
• Script of the domain name itself
• Scripts contained in the web page for the domain where content exists in b)
• Geographical location of hosting for each domain name using the IP address and a lookup database - recording country, region and city for each

Identifying privacy/proxy registrations in the region was a large challenge, because hosting and registrant data are not guaranteed to be region-based. The team worked from a list of 500 popular websites and identified 4,832 unique domain names. They then gathered data through Alexa.com, performing WHOIS lookups to identify use of privacy proxy, country of hosting, website status and registrar of record.

Regional Subset
For any domains that match one or more of the following criteria, a regional subset was produced:

• Country of hosting the webpage was within the region
• The script of the domain name itself contains Arabic characters
• The content of the webpage contained Arabic characters

Arabic Subset
Many domains encountered in the subset produced only contained a small number of Arabic characters, so a further subset was created with those domains where at least 50 Arabic characters occurred on the webpage. These domains were checked to see if their HTML language attributes were set for one of the regional languages.

External Links

• MEAC DNS Study - Draft Report, ICANN.org.
• MEAC DNS Study - Infographics, ICANN.org.

Country code top-level domain

Top-Level Domain

Internationalized Domain Name