On May 25th, the European Union’s GDPR became enforceable and ICANN’s first-ever Temporary Specification came into effect.

On December 6th, Chairwoman of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin submitted a letter to Cherine Chalaby and Goran Marby of ICANN, expressing — in no uncertain terms — the challenges to and expectations of the organization in light of the impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law that will come into force May of 2018.

2017 proved to be an eventful year with the United States pulling back from ICANN, the advance of opportunistic practices by bad actors, and innovative uses of new gTLDS from some of the biggest global brands.  These three trends are important factors to consider as 2018 domain name strategies are considered.  Domain strategies are unique and these three trends should be top of mind.