.Cymru and .Wales Are Now Open To Everyone
Nominet announced that as of yesterday, .Cymru and .Wales domain names are available for everyone. If more than a person will want to register a domain, an auction will be conducted to determine who will win the domain.
You can read the announcement after the jump :
“From today, anyone can apply for .cymru and .wales domain names. So if you’re proud about being Welsh, or the Welsh connection is important to your business, now you can celebrate that by giving your website a name that ends in .cymru or .wales. If more than one person wants to register a domain, an auction will determine who will win the registration.
The domains available will also include a list of popular terms that carry a £50 reserve price plus application and registration fees. So from the 29th, for those looking to create a buzz.wales, everything from the hills.wales to thevalleys.wales is up for grabs.
From 1 March, all .cymru and .wales domain names will be offered on a first come, first served basis.
The new .cymru and .wales domains have already started going live with the Welsh Assembly being the first to switch on its new domains. Strong backing has come from many organisations, including the Welsh government, S4C, Sport Wales, the Federation of Small Businesses Wales, the Scarlets rugby team, the Welsh Rugby Union, the Millennium Stadium, the Arts Council for Wales, Golwg360, Bloc, Gwalia, Atlantic PLC, Orchard and Portmeirion.
For more information, please visit ourhomeonline.wales.”
Verizon Wins Four Verizon-Related Domain Names in Arbitration
An arbitrator with the National Arbitration Forum has recently awarded four Verizon-related domain names to Verizon.The company submitted the complaint on November 7,2014.
The four disputed domain names are: verizonindycarseries.com,verizonindycarseries.info, verizonindycarseries.net and verizonindycarseries.org.
According to whois records, the domain name was first registered in November,2014.
Verizon owns many trademark registrations for the “Verizon” mark all over the world.Therefore,it is more than obvious that the disputed domain names are confusingly similar with its trademark .Moreover,the company contended in the complaint that the respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in the disputed domain names and that the respondent registered and used the disputed domain names in bad faith .
One of the key points of this complaint was when Verizon managed to demonstrate that “Respondent’s decision to allow competing advertisements, as well as other monetized advertising and his decision to have a similar website to the Champweb.net site, presumably with similar content, is suggestive of his aim to capitalize on the likelihood of Internet users’ confusion.”
Verizon managed to establish all three elements required under the ICANN Policy and the Panel ordered the disputed domain names to be transferred from the respondent to the complainant.
You can read the decision here .
MaxHardcore.com Domain Name May Be Auctioned Off ,After Being Seized by the Feds
The domain name MaxHardcore.com may be auctioned off, after the domain name has been seized by the Federal Government back in 2005.
The jury ordered back in 2008 that the domain name to be forfeited and the founder of the domain name, whose real name is Paul F Little , was sentenced to 46 months in prison.
According to whois records,the domain name was first registered in 1995.
The domain name was owned by the United States Department of Justice until December 15th.If the domain name will not be renewed, it will be auctioned off and sold to the highest bidder.
36% of .NL Domain Names Now Signed by DNSSEC
SIDN,the company behind .NL extension, announced that two million .NL domain names are now secured by DNSSEC.This means that 36% of .NL’S 5,5 million domains are secured by DNSSEC.
You can read the announcement after the jump :
“It is only a few months since we proudly announced that one third of all .nl domains were signed. The latest jump is thanks mainly to the activities of two registrars: Yourhosting and Antagonist.
Yourhosting
“This week, our subsidiary Yourhosting started signing domains,” explains Bart Carlier, Yourholding’s General Manager. “We’re now up to more than a hundred thousand. Over the next few weeks, the remainder of the .nl domains that we manage for our clients will follow. Security is one of our main focuses. DNSSEC is a vital part of the protection that we provide and something that the market is pushing strongly for.”
“The main challenge was the complexity of integrating DNSSEC into our backend processes. We worked closely with the people at PowerDNS to get everything sorted.”
Antagonist
“We are currently signing all our domains,” says Wouter de Vries, Antagonist’s founder. “We have nearly 65,000 .nl domains, the majority of which we also manage. All those names are going to be signed.”
“Here at Antagonist, we are very security-minded. Our new Patchman service is a good example of that. DNSSEC is another important feature of our security strategy. It’s good that the Netherlands is leading the way when it comes to the application of DNSSEC. But we are pressing ahead with the signing of domains under other TLDs as well, in parallel with what we’re doing under .nl.”
Like Yourhosting, Antagonist uses PowerDNS. “We switched from Bind to PowerDNS quite some time ago. It’s a really good package, especially for large-scale applications. We’ve been using it for some years and we’re very satisfied with it.”
Implementation
“For registrars, the key question is how to implement DNSSEC in their environments,” explains Michiel Henneke, Marketing Manager at SIDN. “The best way to go about it very much depends on which DNS software and control panel you use. The general experience is that it’s easiest to concentrate on the DNS software first. Once that is working the way you want, you can turn your attention to the control panel. The Netherlands is very much ahead of the game where DNSSEC is concerned, so control panel suppliers are still in the process of integrating DNSSEC support into software.”
“Fortunately, we have a substantial number of registrars who have already introduced DNSSEC and are willing to share their experience with others. (cases of dnssec ) As a result, registrars who already use PowerDNS have a good idea of how long implementation should take and what the risks are.”
Software support
“SIDN’s incentive scheme has certainly been an important driver for the introduction of DNSSEC,” continues Henneke. “We benefited from seeing how the Czech Republic and Sweden had incentivised registrars. It’s been so successful that we have recently extended our scheme to run until the end of 2018. The growth of DNSSEC has also been fuelled by the requirement that new gTLDs must support DNSSEC right from the start.”
“We are now looking at how we can make it easier for registrars who work with resellers to implement DNSSEC. How do you enable a reseller who manages maybe a couple of thousand domains to easily sign domains registered through a registrar that supports DNSSEC? Small businesses can’t easily afford to develop their own solutions and consequently tend to be dependent on the software suppliers. We are therefore pressing the software houses to integrate DNSSEC support into their products. Full adoption of DNSSEC depends on them.”
AOL Wins Engadget.XYZ Domain Name in Arbitration
An arbitrator with the National Arbitration Forum has recently awarded the domain name Engadget.xyz to AOL.The company submitted the complaint on November 7,2014.
According to whois records, the domain name was first registered in July,2014.
AOL owns many trademark registrations for the “Engadget” mark all over the world.Therefore,it is more than obvious that the disputed domain namea is confusingly similar with its trademark .Moreover,the company contended in the complaint that the respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in the disputed domain name and that the respondent registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith .
One of the key points of this complaint was when AOL managed to demonstrate that “Respondent uses the disputed domain name in connection with a commercial website that promotes links to third-party sites in competition with Complainant’s offerings, no doubt for commercial gain. “
AOL managed to establish all three elements required under the ICANN Policy and the Panel ordered the disputed domain name to be transferred from the respondent to the complainant.
You can read the decision here .
