eco International
A significant highlight for the eco Association on the international stage was the joint hosting of the ICANN78 meeting in Hamburg, which took place together with DENIC eG and the City of Hamburg. This was the first ICANN meeting held in Germany since ICANN2 in 1999 in Berlin. At the ICANN78 meeting, approximately 2,800 international delegates attended the conference in the Hanseatic city.
The topDNS Initiative of the Names & Numbers Forum Competence Group was a very successful project that had been launched in 2022. In 2023, this initiative continued to unite members in the fight against DNS abuse. The initiative not only works closely with the Anti-Abuse and Security Competence Groups, but also with numerous partners such as the DNS Abuse Institute, the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network and the Global Cyber Alliance. Over the course of the year, topDNS gained further supporters from IONOS, InterNetX, Cloudflare and nic.at.
Throughout the year, the association’s “Policy & Law” division shared information on current regulatory topics from the European Union and Germany, with these provided via Policy Alert, Policy Digest, the weekly View from Brussels, the “eco european” newsletter, as well as the “EuroISPA Monthly Report”. Furthermore, members were regularly informed about current topics – such as the CSAM Regulation – from the European institutions via the online format “eco bxlTALK”.
Throughout the year, eco represented its members at numerous international events, such as the Gaia-X Summit and ICANN meetings . The intensive collaboration with ICANN continued in 2023 with a series of webinars and the now-established readouts, in which the results of ICANN meetings are summarised and discussed. As an active member of the board of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, the Alliance for the Strengthening of Digital Infrastructures in Germany was also active beyond Germany’s borders. In collaboration with EuroISPA, the eco Names & Numbers Forum informed members about the topDNS initiative in order to promote closer cooperation between registries and registrars, as well as ISPs and hosting providers.
International members
In 2023, eco had almost 400 member companies from over 60 countries based outside of Germany. The majority of these member companies are located in the European Union and North America states. With the support of the English-language service offer, which has been expanded in recent years, many members have been able to become even more intensively involved in the active work of the association.
At the end of the year, Vivien Witt was appointed as “Adviser International Stakeholder Management and Strategic Partnerships” to coordinate association activities in Brussels and to maintain and expand eco Association’s network. At the same time, Lars Steffen was elected as Vice-President of the EuroISPA Board. He succeeds eco Board Member Oliver Süme and eco Honorary President Michael Rotert, who have both been members of the EuroISPA Board for many years. Michael Rotert remains as Honorary Speaker, and Oliver Süme continues as Chair of the EuroISPA Data Economy Committee.
Cooperative activities & events
In addition, eco continued its existing cooperation with a variety of European partner associations. The close exchange of views on positions and current topics with CISPE, the Dutch and Danish Cloud Community, the Dutch and European Data Centre Association, and other European industry associations was also maintained.
The cooperation between eco and the Internet Society in 2023 was primarily characterised by the joint activities of the Global Encryption Coalition. eco’s prior CEO Harald A. Summa continues to serve as Co-Chair on the Organization Member Advisory Council. Lars Steffen was elected as an Executive Committee Member in the leadership of the ISPCP at ICANN to promote networking among ISPs on topics such as domains and DNS.
As part of the topDNS initiative, a partnership was also established with the Global Cyber Alliance.
International communication
The English-language magazine for members, entitled dotmagazine, continued to attract great interest from readers and authors within the eco member community in 2023. Nearly 80,000 visitors from all over the world accessed its articles and interviews. The regularly changing topics cover all relevant areas of the Internet industry’s value chain. Interested members are cordially invited to contact dotmagazine@eco.de.
Newsletter, social media & websites
The dotmagazine newsletter provides monthly information about the association’s activities and regularly presents the latest articles. The number of subscribers once again markedly grew to reach over 1,300 in 2023.
The number of followers of the English-language eco account on X (formerly Twitter) increased once more over the course of the year. The English-language LinkedIn account was able to gain approximately 400 new followers by the end of the year. Regular posts about the association’s activities are published on the industry platform CircleID.com.
The eco International team also successfully continued its translation and support work for all fields of the association – including the CSA, Gaia-X and GXFS, Service-Meister and EuroCloud. Over the course of the year, well over 200 association news items, interviews, annual reports, studies, positions and documents were translated and published on international.eco.de. In the year under review, more than 70 articles were created and published for dotmagazine in collaboration with members, partners and colleagues from the various sectors. Increasingly, follow-up reports from selected webinars are also being created and made available to members via members+. The supporters of the topDNS Initiative also published a print edition.
With Judith Ellis having left the eco International team at the end of 2022 to pursue new ventures in her future role as Global Content Manager Public Relations at DE-CIX, Ladan Raeisian has now became a permanent team member. She had already been working for eco International during her studies over the prior two years.
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