The highlight of the European domain name calendar is fast approaching with the Domain Pulse conference set for 18 and 19 February in the Swiss alpine resort of Davos.
Best known for hosting the World Economic Forum, which will be held in late January, Davos will be cleared of world leaders and the important issues impacting on domain names can then be the focus of this annual event.
Highlights of the 2013 Domain Pulse will be an analysis of the Top Level Domain landscape by presentations from new gTLD applicants for .swiss, .wien and .zuerich, cybercrime online from Team Cymru, Matthew Zook from Zooknic and a presentation on a secure internet in Switzerland. There will also be a presentation on the 2012 Registrar Atlas that looks at issues affecting registrars in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France.
Domain Pulse is co-hosted by the Swiss (SWITCH), Austrian (nic.at) and German (DENIC) registries who take it in turns to host the event. While most presentations are in German, there will be simultaneous translations from German into English, or English into German.
Registration and attendance at this unique event is free, with hotel and transport costs the only expense for attendees. More information, and to register, can be found at www.domainpulse.ch
“What has really happened as a result of .XXX?” one year on from its launch is the focus of an article on Xbiz.
The article notes that “among other things, new sites have come to market, new companies have formed to capitalise on new opportunities in the adult space and a level of accountability and oversight added to an industry that has long shunned supervision of any sort — while the majority of trademark disputes have been swiftly resolved in favour of the legitimate rights holders.”
And it notes that ICM Registry’s Stuart Lawley claims .XXX “has comfortably exceeded the company’s sales expectations — based on the figures it communicated back in 2003 and 2004 in its original application to ICANN.” ICM also believes renewal rates will be high, even though the first anniversary is not quite here.
The .pw ccTLD is relaunching being branded as ‘the Professional Web, with the new registry opening up a 68-day sunrise programme as of 3 December. The sunrise offers some unique features aimed at reducing overhead for brand-owners.
A guest posting on DomainNameNews from Kate Moran of TM.Biz, .pw’s trademark validation agent, looked at trademark validation for .PW. Unsurprisingly the posting considers .pw a leader, saying “the .pw registry is proposing to protect not only exact matches, but also any domain containing the trademark, misspellings, abbreviations and language translations of the validated trademark. The trademark validation agent, TM.Biz is coupling these rules with automated searches of 70 trademark databases.”
On 4 December, the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ and the Technical Center of Internet generated DNSSEC keys for .RU, one of the two Russian national domains. A formal event signified the first phase of signing .RU with DNSSEC, with all works expected to be finalised by the end of December 2012.
The .FR registry, Afnic, has released their December 2012 Domain Name Industry. The latest report looks at the growth rate for IPV6-compatible .fr domain names. In the report Afnic focuses on the success rate of Syreli claims in relation to the age of the domain name. Everything suggests that rights-holders are reactive and quickly intervene to enforce their rights via the Syreli procedure. The full report is available from the Afnic website here.
SIDN, the .nl registry, has published their final report of the 2012 Domain Name Debate. The debate examined issues such as availability of registrant’s details from Whois and drop catching. To check out the final report, check out the SIDN website here.
The price to registrars of .ee domain names will be cut by 11.8 percent on 1 March 2013, which will see the price cut from €17 to €15. Maximum registration periods will also be extended with options of two and three years.
Registrations of .vn domain names hit225,970 in the third quarter of 2012 according to VNNIC’s white paper on Vietnam’s internet.
Alternative Dispute Resolution celebrated its tenth birthday on 12 December, the .be registry dns.be announced. To mark the occasion, Cepina (the Belgian Centre for Arbitration and Mediation) organised a symposium in conjunction with DNS.be.
Norid, the registry for .no domain names, is again receiving reports on a company who tries to force Norwegian companies to buy domain names. The service is said to be offered to protect a company name or brand.
The issue may be a proposal to register a domain name within other top level domains, such as .com or .as, or they may suggest to register the domain name in different spellings, for instance with and without a hyphen. The company who offers services like this, often tells a story about other actors interested in buying the domain name, and that they need a quick decision.
