ICANN has published the first list of registry service providers that have passed parts of its technical evaluation ahead of the 2026 round of new generic top-level domains. The list identifies which providers are already cleared to support future gTLD applicants.
Research ICT Africa has submitted formal comments on draft regulations under South Africa’s Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Act, raising questions about implementation capacity, data protection, and constitutional safeguards.
A new submission to the UN Independent Expert details how criminalisation, weak safeguards and technology-facilitated violence combine to expose lesbian, bisexual and queer women to heightened risks, including in digital spaces.
Austria and Poland are preparing legislation to restrict minors’ access to social media, joining a growing number of European countries debating age-based controls for online platforms.
A court in Hangzhou has ruled that an AI developer is not automatically responsible for false information generated by its system, unless a user can prove fault and actual harm.
The GNSO Standing Selection Committee has reached consensus on its preferred candidate for a Fellowship Programme mentoring role, following a review of applications and survey feedback during its January 2026 meeting.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a campaign calling on several large technology companies to broaden and enable end-to-end encryption. The initiative focuses on protecting users’ private messages, files, and data from unauthorised access.
The Dutch competition and consumer authority has launched an investigation into Roblox to assess whether the platform complies with EU rules on protecting minors online. The probe focuses on child safety obligations under the Digital Services Act.
ICANN is asking for public input on new procedural documents that explain how risks related to name collisions will be assessed in the 2026 round of new generic top-level domains. The consultation focuses on how potentially harmful domain strings will be identified and managed before they are introduced into the DNS.
The World Wide Web Consortium has released a draft guide on how text-to-speech technology should read documents that include ruby annotations. The draft focuses on explaining user needs and reading strategies so that speech output sounds natural across different writing systems.
Civil Society Alliances for Digital Empowerment (CADE) is a project co-funded by the European Union.
