Issue 168 - 29th October 2004

.pro update - additional professions available from 8th November

RegistryPro have announced that .pro second-level domains will be available to engineers (.ing.pro, .eng.pro), architects (.arc.pro) and dentists (.den.pro, .dds.pro and .dnt.pro) from 8th November. Until now, .pro has only been available to lawyers, doctors and accountants.

Also, some additional suffixes will be made available to the legal and medical communities. For example, barrister will be able to register .bar.pro in addition to .law.pro.

A sunrise period of one week will run from 1st November, for trademark holders. To register .pro, go to www.netnames.com.

Decision process for next operator of .net begins

It has recently been reported in online media that ICANN will soon begin the decision process in order to choose the next .net registry operator. VeriSign Inc. currently look after .net - the agreement they signed with ICANN in May 2001 will expire on 30th June, 2005.

In 2001, VeriSign agreed to relinquish control over .net in exchange for a contract that would give it almost permanent control over the more profitable .com, which has over 30 million registered domains. In contrast, there are approximately 5 million .net domains in existence. Even so, the .net operator deal is thought to be worth about 30 million per year. Approximately 30 percent of all e-commerce traffic and more than 150 billion e-mail messages a year travel through the .net domain.

AfriNIC close to becoming established registry

ICANN has announced the provisional recognition of the African Network Information Center (AfriNIC), which is the last stage before it achieves full recognition. AfriNIC has begun managing Internet Protocol (IP)v4 and IPv6 addresses for the Africa region.

Two sTLDs given initial go ahead

ICANN has entered into commercial and technical negotiations with two of the candidate registries for sponsored Top Level Domains (sTLDs), specifically .post and .travel. Eight other applications are still being considered. ICANN suggested that the decision was reached primarily due to the speed at which the two candidates had supplied specifications. This decision is not a guarantee that the domains will come into existence.

Freddy Adu wins domain back

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has ruled in favour of Freddy Adu, US soccer's most expensive player, in a cybersquatting case. Ghanaian-born Adu, who is only 15, filed a complaint against soccer fan Frank Fushille, who registered freddyadu.com in 2002.