Nic News ..

A speedier service for France

From March 15, 2001 companies will no longer need to produce their Kbis form (company registration form) in order to register a domain name under .fr. They will fill out a lettre d'engagement, supplied by their provider, who will forward the document on to the French NIC (AFNIC). AFNIC will then check the existence of the company online in real-time and ensure that the company has the right to register the requested name, in conformity with the naming rules currently in place for .fr. Overall, the new procedure will allow for a much speedier and simplified registration system for all eligible companies.

Industry Update ..

PortofHelsinki.com bid rejected

WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organisation) this week flew in the face of earlier rulings when it rejected a claim by the port authority of the city of Helsinki in Finland to claim PortOfHelsinki.com from UK-based Paragon International Projects Ltd.

Six months ago in a similar case, WIPO ruled that Barcelona.com should be handed back to the Spanish city of that name, despite the seemingly legitimate content of the tourism-oriented site.

Paragon International possesses a large collection of domains referring to sea ports around the world. WIPO arbitrator, Henry Olsson, said the fact that Paragon had registered so many sea port domains was evidence, not of cybersquatting, but that it was attempting to build a legitimate transportation web portal.

Domain name scam halted

The US government this week shut down the web sites of company known variously as the National Domain Name Registry, Electronic Domain Name Monitoring and Corporate Domain Name Monitoring.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the company sent faxes to web site owners claiming that an unidentified third party had tried to register a site with a near-identical name, but that the application could be halted for a $70 fee.

The faxes were deceptive however, as no third party had registered the name and domain name applications are usually approved instantly. At least 27,000 consumers are said to have fallen victim to the scam.

ICANN member castigates organisation

Karl Auerbach, a member of ICANN's (Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers) board of directors since last October, this week brought a litany of complaints against the organisation to a US Senate subcommittee.

During the hearing, Auerbach called the organisation secretive and said that in the short time he had been an ICANN director, the organisation had confirmed his fears of suffering from a lack of public process, lack of accountability, poor communication and excessive delegation of business practices.

NetNames news

NetNames is pleased to announce that you will soon be able to pre-register .com names in up to 32 European languages including German, French, Estonian and Polish. If you wish to secure the best of the new names for your clients, please click here to register your interest in the relevant multilinguals.

Fact of the Week..

A two year study by Alexa Research this week found that 'sex' is the most popular online search term, with 1 in 300 enquiries. A large number of web users search for specific sites rather than enter their URLs. Hotmail, Yahoo, Ebay and AOL all featured in the top 10 search terms as well.

The survey was based on analysis of over 42 million search pages from 10 leading search engines. Other terms that made the top twenty included 'chat', 'mp3', 'pokemon' and 'free'.

Tip of the Week ..

Don't forget that you can register your interest in the new gTLDs (generic top level domains) by going to www.gtld.com. The new domains, including .info, are set to go live in June 2001.

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