June 2008 Archives

The management team behind PIR (dotOrg) have a blog.


Although there are only a couple of articles on there at present hopefully they'll be adding more content over the coming weeks and months.

You'll have to excuse my feeble attempt at a pun!

The WIPO UDRP decision involving carlsberg.tv is incredibly short and does not contain any surprises.

Carlsberg is an internationally recognised brand - its the 5th largest brewing company in the world!

Carlsberg have a very well established usage and have taken steps to protect their brand in many territories globally:

The Complainant has registered several trademarks containing "Carlsberg" in more than 150 jurisdictions around the world, including the United Kingdom. Additionally, the Complainant is the holder of several domain names incorporating Carlsberg, including <carlsberg.co.uk>, <carlsberg.eu> and <carlsberg.dk>. Furthermore the website "www.carlsberg.com" is the Complainant's general international site.

Since the respondent didn't actually respond the decision was boringly straightforward.

Comreg, the Irish communications regulator, is starting a consultation process on the IE namespace.

The consultation paper is ComReg 08/48.

Unfortunately any links on the ComReg site to the aforementioned document are returning a 404 (not found) error at present, so it will probably be Monday before we will be able to see the document's contents.

EDIT: The links are now working again and the document is now available. In case it goes AWOL again I've made a copy available here as well:
ComReg0848.pdf

Short domains are more memorable.

You can't really argue with that.

However a lot of registries don't allow them for a variety of reasons.

The Isle of Man is one of the few exceptions that springs to mind, as they allow pretty much any length, but charge more for the shorter ones.

The Irish domain registry does not allow two letter domains, but will allow two character domains. (There is one two letter IE domain which predates the registry).

In the big bad world of gTLDs releasing the one and two letter domains that are still available comes up for discussion from time to time. Stephane has posted recently about what's being going on with .mobi and .coop.

The .coop registry has been given approval to release two character domains, while both .coop and .mobi have been informed that their requests regarding single character domains do not pose any issue and have been referred to the ICANN board.

I'm not sure how popular .coop's domains will prove, but I expect the .mobi ones will be very popular and are bound to fetch very high prices if they are released via auction.

In any case it's doubtful if mere mortals will be able to afford them! :)

There had been some speculation in domain circles over the last few weeks about the fate of Tucows' aftermarket domains.

That speculation has now come to an end, as Tucows have announced their partnership with Afternic.

What's particularly interesting is that Tucows will be sharing the revenue with their resellers!

We're pleased to announce that you'll receive ten per cent of the Gross
Sale Price on the sale, at auction through Afternic, of any expired
domains that originated from your Reseller account. That revenue will
be deposited directly into your reseller account on a monthly basis.

Now that is interesting!

Are other registrars going to follow suit?

I somehow doubt it, but it would be an interesting and attractive revenue stream for many of the hosting companies that rely on ICANN registrars to handle their domain registrations

More information, including a vidcast from their domain portfolio manager, is available on the Tucows blog

The decision regarding facebook.com.au has been published

The respondent tried to use the defence that no trademark existed in Australia at the time of registration, however that argument was rejected.

The respondent also tried to argue that they were intending on using the domain name for a legitimate service.

You can read over the decision, with arguments from both sides and make up your own mind.

This site is now available over both ipv6 and ipv4

Anti-virus vendor McAfee have released their second report on Malware (pdf) which tracks incidences of malware on a TLD basis.

The previous report, which received a lot of press coverage, was very favourable for several ccTLDs, including .ie (Ireland).

This time round the Irish ccTLD may not be listed in the "dangerous" list, but the threat levels have practically doubled!

This year's report also includes data on .eu, which is showing that over 2% of EU sites are dangerous.

However those figures pale in comparison to the 19% risk rate of .hk (Hong Kong) or the 11% of .cn (China).

With such a high incidence of risk concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region the new dotAsia TLD will have its work cut out, or risk being flagged in a similar manner to .info (11.7% risk)

More coverage over on the excellent Domain Name News site