CZ.NIC association marks 25 years since its foundation

On Thursday, May 21, 1998, the CZ.NIC association, the administrator of the Czech national domain was established. In September 1999 the association was officially appointed to manage the .CZ domain. This date also marks the beginning of paid registrations of the Czech second level domain names.

On May 21, 25 years ago, representatives of 16 companies providing Internet access signed the founding charter of the CZ.NIC Association. The organization, whose main mission was and still is the administration of the Czech national domain, has gradually become an internationally respected institution responsible for projects such as the routing daemon BIRD, the FRED registration system, the authoritative DNS server Knot DNS or Knot Resolver. Users in the Czech Republic are certainly familiar with the MojeID, Datovka and Safer Internet Center projects. In addition to 25 years of the Association, CZ.NIC also marks 30 years of the Czech national domain. The Internet domain administrator ICANN assigned the .CZ domain to the Czech Republic on 13 January, replacing the .CS domain, which ceased to exist together with the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic. The CZ.NIC Association currently has 121 members and holds records of almost 1.5 million domains with Czech national extension.

“This year our Association marks 30 years of the .CZ domain and 25 years of the CZ.NIC Association. For me personally, these are two very important and special milestones, to which I would like to add a personal one, namely 20 years of my work in this exceptional institution. I joined the CZ.NIC Association as a member of the then Board of Directors at the end of 2003 and two years later became its CEO,” recalls Ondřej Filip, CEO of the CZ.NIC Association. “Twenty years ago, CZ.NIC had only a handful of employees and most of its activities, even the key ones, were outsourced. Of course, we have plenty of intense experiences and memories from those years. From the decision to develop and launch our own domain management system, to the introduction of DNSSEC, in which we were one of the first in the world at the time, to the registration of our millionth domain in 2012. Over the years, we have undertaken a long list of activities and I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in CZ.NIC.”

The year 2003 brought a major change, namely the transition to a new decentralized registration system. The CZ.NIC Association retained the role of registry administrator, but the service was offered by independent entities, registrars. In 2007, the FRED system was implemented, which brought a significant reduction in the domain price. A year later, the Association introduced DNSSEC security technology. In the following years, the CZ.NIC Labs were established, under which the world-famous BIRD, Knot DNS and Knot Resolver projects were developed. Another integral part of the Association is the CZ.NIC Academy, which offers courses designed primarily for Internet professionals, and the CZ.NIC Publications, which is focused on publishing professional titles. The MojeID project, which was established in 2010, is currently one of the most noticeable achievements of the Association. The service underwent its biggest development in 2019, when the FIDO 2 authentication standard was introduced to increase security and the option of validating accounts using CzechPOINT was added. In 2020, MojeID was also connected to public administration systems.

For more information about the history of the Czech national domain administrator and the .CZ domain, please visit the CZ.NIC website. Here you can also find information about individual projects and activities or year-by-year statistics.