Until recently, the Danish registry used to only verify contact information for registrants with an address in Denmark. In theory foreigners could also be verified, but this hardly ever happened. Any Danish registrant wanting to by-pass the verification, just needed to select a different country when registering their domain name.
While that old way of working was absurd, the Danish registry now made a complete U-turn which in practice can make a new domain name registration under .dk impossible for foreigners living in a non-English (or Danish) speaking country.
On top of that, foreign registrants might at any time loose their existing and active .dk domain names.
DK-Hostmaster makes a risk-based assessment to decide if they’ll request ID-verification from the owner or not. They do this with every new registration, but they might at any time also request you to proof your identity for existing domain names. Once they requested you to proof your contact details (including address information), they will no longer accept small rectifications to the information they have on file for you.
You have only once chance to supply the correct paperwork, before your domain name goes off-line. If you also fail to send in documents that are satisfactory to DK-Hostmaster in a second attempt, you completely loose all your .dk domain name registrations.
For foreigners, the biggest issue however is that the .dk-registry demands to receive documents either in English or Danish. For many non-English speaking countries, getting a bank statement or utility bill in English is simply impossible. While they refuse to give support related to a concrete case, .dk does (off the record) indicate that documents in an other language might also be accepted, if the verification agent decides they’re sufficiently comprehensible.
This means that a document that is accepted for one verification might be refused for the next verification. Causing all .dk domain names for that owner to instantly go off-line. Even domain names that have previously been successfully verified using the exact same documents. Simply because the verification happened to be carried out by a verification agent who wasn’t in the right mood to understand a document in Dutch or French or German or….
Seemingly at random verifications get refused with as only explanation “the documentation is not in English or Danish”. For new registrations this means the registration fee is lost and typically the registrant will decide to move on to an other extension. For existing domain names, the effects can be devastating as e-mails stop arriving and the website becomes unreachable.
In a response to our article, DK-Hostmaster informed us that they indeed only accept documents in English or Danish language, “to ensure a consistent decision-making process“. It seems that they achieved the exact opposite by this.
They also indicate that, if no English documents can be obtained, a legally certified (apostille) translation will also be accepted.
They aren’t yet considering eIDAS (e-ID) to be able to complete verifications. This is currently already very successfully used by a number of European registries for ID-verification (amongst others .ee, .be, .eu and .bg). But DK-Hostmaster currently finds the system too immature.
Since the launch of the ID verification by DK-hostmaster in 2017, their system was internationally often mentioned as an example of “how not to implement ID-verification”. In the lead up to NIS2 legislation, which will require some sort of verification to be carried out by all European registrars, the Danish seem to be eager to hold on to that status.
The complete .cd zone (country code for the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is off-line since at least yesterday, because the .cd-registry forgot to renew the .net domain name under which all nameservers for .cd are hosted.
We recently reported that 
DNS Belgium (the registry behind .be, .vlaanderen and .brussels) had been working on their new “good cause” for a while: 
Only about a month ago we reported about a 
Every 3 months a special ceremony takes place in which new cryptographic “Zone Signing Keys” are being signed, which will be used the next quarter to secure the root DNS zone. These DNSSEC keys are the basis of every DNSSEC-protected domain name. A copy of the “Key Signing Key” required for this, is kept at two secure locations in the US. In order to be able to use it, multiple steps need to be taken during a lengthy ceremony, including the opening of two safes by IANA/ICANN staff. February 12th such a ceremony should have taken place. Since the expected life time of the safes had been reached, IANA had scheduled for them to be replaced. For one of the safes, the expected life time turned out to be extremely accurate: while trying to open it, the lock mechanism refused to cooperate. 
Sectigo (formerly known as Comodo) is one of the leading providers for certificates. Such certificates are used to encrypt internet traffic going to websites and mailservers. Sectigo is now recalling almost 6000 certificates, all of which were issued to companies from The Netherlands. The recall action was announced Wednesday. Affected clients have less than one week to install a new certificate. On January 28 the old certificates will be revoked and websites on which the certificate has not been replaced will refuse to load. 
Last week over 350.000 .uk domain names have (finally) been claimed by their rightful owner. Over the last 3 weeks combined, there were even well over one million .uk domain names registered. That’s much more than for example the 271.000 .uk names registered during the 52 weeks of 2018.