Régis Massé appointed Chair of the ICANN ccNSO TLD-OPS Standing Committee

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.