COVID-19 Information and other news (2022-)

As the .GG and .JE names are important part of Island life, we have long-established risk management and continuity plans in place to ensure that the registry continues with business as usual whatever the circumstance. This is also applicable to the role we play as the ‘back-end’ provider for the .AS domain registry.

In response to the challenges of COVID-19, our primary task is to ensure continued operations whilst protecting our people. So, immediately upon receiving advice from the States of Guernsey's Civil Contingency Authority at the very start of the pandemic in early 2020 we closed our offices at Maison Postel to visitors and employees, with the exception of necessary maintenance visits.

Although our people would be classified as essential workers, we are extremely fortunate in that, with some adaptations, almost all of what we need to do can be done by a distributed team, working from home in Alderney, with addition support from colleagues in England and S. Africa.  We are quite used to using remote working tools, such as Zoom through the work we do with ICANN and CENTR.

Back in 2020, We cancelled all in-person attendance at overseas and UK events for the indefinite future and this remains in force as of the beginning of 2022.

Although the Bailiwick of Guernsey had acheived very low incidences of COVID-19throughout much of the pandemic, several of our people have family members who are categorised as vulnerable, so we continue to support home working, and our offices remain closed. This is likely to become a permanent part of our way of working.

The Bailiwick's Civil Contingencies Authority agreed in 2021 to reopen our borders to the other Crown Dependencies (Jersey and the Isle of Man), the whole of UK, and also to Ireland. (In other words the whole of the Common Travel Area including the Republic of Ireland.)

We have been in a position to re-open Maison Postel to personal callers for some time. However as before, and with more recent adaptations, almost 100% our work can be done remotely, so we have take the decision that it should remain closed for the time being and we will continue to review the situation regularly.

OMICRON: The COVID-19 situation is developing rapidly, with the emergence of novel, and highly transmissible variants of the SARS-nCoV2 virus. This has re-emphasised our decision to continue with allowing our people to work from home. Things may change at short notice, so this information page should be viewed as a guide - if you have any questions at all regarding our COVID-19 protocols, please do not hesitate to call us on Guernsey (01481) 511713 or Jersey (01534) 521713 for the latest information or (if your question is non-urgent) email us as per the details on our Contact Page.

Technical Work

Since the advent of COVID-19 we entered into an agreement with Nominet UK (the operators of .UK) who are now providing us with a secondary name resolution service for us.

This is in addition to our existing “anycast” services from trusted partners Netnod and PCH.

We have also continued to improve the security of the Islands' naming system and have now fully implemented the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) which provides additional security to the local domains.

In addition, our work against DNS abuse continues. We have a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding with ICANN on combating abuse and criminal activity within the DAAR program. DAAR is a system for studying and reporting on domain name registration and security threat (domain abuse) behaviour across top-level domain (TLD) registries.

Our support for the wider community

We are aware that a number of registrants may find their businesses struggling.

Accordingly we added an additional renewal grace period before registrations are cancelled for non-payment. In addition, we have also been monitoring cancellations closely – where It appears possible that registrations might have been cancelled inadvertently, we are reaching out to the registrant to ensure that wanted domains are not lost to their owners.

Once the pandemic is over, business and enterprise will need a helping hand.

In our own island home of Alderney, we are now actively supporting local startup businesses through the medium of a new charity, the AY Enterprise Trust (Guernsey Registered Charity CH639) which was formed in early May.

Please contact us for more information about this if it is of interest to you.