Issue 182 - 24th March 2005

.eu set to move forward

On Tuesday, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the delegation of the forthcoming .eu generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) and authorised their CEO to enter into an agreement with EURid, the non-profit organisation concerned with overseeing .eu's implementation. This follows approximately five months of negotiation between ICANN and EURid and the prior approval of the European Commission. The next stage is for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to put .eu into the root Domain Name System (DNS) servers. Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid, described this step as the 'green light' for launch.

Also, EURid have announced their appointment of PriceWaterhouseCoopers as the validation agent for the sunrise period. EURid hope to publish the Registration Policy on their site in May, including a list of registrars approved for pre-registration. It is hoped that a four month sunrise period will begin by the end of the year, with general availability following.

More information is available at http://www.gTLD.com/doteu.html.

Nominet gives Apple itunes.co.uk

As previously reported in N3 Lite, Apple made a complaint to Nominet towards the end of last year about CyberBritain Holdings' registration of itunes.co.uk. The domain was registered (back in 2000) a month before the iTunes trademark and some three years before Apple bought the itunes.com domain name and launched iTunes in the States (the UK campaign following a year later). Yet Nominet have ruled in Apple's favour.

Nominet's web-page on the decision can be found at http://www.nominet.org.uk/DisputeResolution/Decisions/Drs02223Itunes.html. It mentions that CyberBritian at one point apparently made an offer to sell the domain to Napster, a competitor of Apple's iTunes service, and also that for a short time itunes.co.uk redirected to napster.co.uk. It seems that these facts had some bearing in the decision.

ICANN news

ICANN recently opened a 21 day public comment period on African Internet Numbers Registry's (AfriNIC) Application for Recognition as the official Regional Internet number Registry (RIR) for the Africa region. More details are at http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-14mar05.htm.

The new .net Registry contract, the first draft of which is available at http://www.icann.org/tlds/dotnet-reassignment/draft-net-agreement-9mar05.pdf, takes steps to avoid disputes over "Registry services" such as the ongoing dispute between ICANN and VeriSign over its Site Finder service. This is achieved by a clear definition of "Registry services" and the procedure that would be followed should a Registry Operator make such a proposal.

A director of .au (Australian) Domain Administration (auDA), Tony Staley, has been elected to ICANN's Nominating Committee as the delegate of operators of country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs).