DENIC CEO Sabine Dolderer announced today that she will not extend her standing contract at DENIC eG, the managing organization and central registry of the .DE domain, but leave DENIC‘s Executive Board at the end of February, 2014. Ms Dolderer has accompanied the DENIC (Deutsches Network Information Center) project since as early as 1994 already, when all administration and DNS services of the .DE domain were still provided at university level. Starting 1997, when the cooperative DENIC eG was founded, Ms Dolderer became general manager for the business and the services of the .DE operator in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where all the registry’s services have been bundled, since then. In 2001, Ms Dolderer was initially appointed a full-time member of the Executive Board. Presently she holds the position of CEO. In this role, she is responsible for all non-technical business areas.
Thereby, Ms Dolderer was significantly involved in the design and further development of the domain administration system for the top level domain .DE. Thanks to the stability of its infrastructure and the relatively liberal registration conditions, in Germany, .DE under the auspices of Ms Dolderer very early gained the leading position among all country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) worldwide and clearly holds the first rank among the country-targeted TLDs still today, currently scoring a 15.5+ million domain inventory.

During the 17 years of its existence, the operator of .DE which is organized in the form of a cooperative and comprises today nearly 300 member companies of the German and international Internet industry, thus representing a broad cross-section of the diverging interests of all Internet user groups, repeatedly took a leading role in further developing registry services and setting technical standards: To start with, DENIC was a pioneer when it introduced the registry/registrar model as early as in the 1990s, long before any other of the large TLDs considered to do so. DENIC was also the first country code registry that started running its name server network completely independently, in 2003. Moreover, in 2004, the Cooperative was one of the first TLDs that included IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) in their character set permitted for domain names.

In 2007, DENIC expanded its own data center operation and implemented a comprehensive redundancy concept based on two state-of-the-art mirror data centers at two geographically spaced locations that guarantee utmost resilience and security. The multiple-redundant name service network of the latest generation, which is located at the currently most important Internet hubs in the world and is permanently upgraded according to requirements, possesses sufficient spare capacity to ideally suit the technological challenges of the coming years. Within the scope of DENIC's new DNS anycast slave services field of business, third-party TLDs may book secondary DNS services since 2010 and thus benefit from the worldwide accessibility and the high computing performance of DENIC's name servers. At the end of May 2011, after an 18-month testbed, DENIC introduced DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) for the .DE zone.

In the meantime, the business model of self-controlled domain administration including the independent operation of the related technical infrastructure has long proven successful in Germany. After more than 17 years of administering and providing technical support for .DE domains, the impartial cooperative DENIC, operating as a private-sector not-for-profit organization, stands for competence, reliability and integrity and enjoys much trust and respect also among German politics. In its role of neutral service provider, DENIC has always demonstrated a clear commitment to the basic concept of democracy and non-discrimination of the Internet, for the benefit of the entire Internet community.

Ms Dolderer never ceased promoting the spirit of a free and open Internet also within the realms of the international Internet organizations such as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) or the IGF (Internet Governance Forum) where she has been actively involved for many years and where thanks to her strong expertise and extensive experience in the field of domain administration she also held several leading posts, over the years. These included positions within CENTR, the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries, where she acted as Treasurer, from 2000 to 2004, and later sat on the Board of Directors, from 2007 to 2010.

 “On behalf of the Supervisory Board, I would like to thank Sabine Dolderer for the many years of excellent and trustful cooperation, for her personal commitment and the great accomplishments she has attained for the Cooperative“, said Thomas Keller, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of DENIC eG. “Not only has she played a vital role in the progress of DENIC, showing broad vision and a deep understanding of the needs of the market, and this way ever tuning it to the fast-changing challenges of the future. She also never tired in pushing DENIC to become the fundamental pillar of the German Internet, that has earned global recognition and a worldwide reputation today.”

For the time after her withdrawal, Ms Dolderer has not yet any specific plans: “The 17-year experience at the top of DENIC, from the founding of the Cooperative until today, from the start-up organization to the medium-sized company employing some 120 workforce, was an incredibly exciting and rewarding time, and looking back I feel a particular sense of gratitude and pride. But now that the “child“ has grown up, I am anxious to give my creative thoughts and imagination another go, taking another direction once more.“

The Supervisory Board of DENIC eG will now confer about further proceedings as a result of Ms Dolderer’s withdrawal and will advise the next steps in due course.