Philippine
government intervenes in domain dispute
A
debate involving the Philippines’ ‘.ph’ country code
top-level domain is being escalated to ICANN (the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), after the
Philippine government and DotPH, the .ph registry, failed to
agree on a number of issues.
Of
key importance is resolving whether DotPH has engaged in
price-setting detrimental to consumers, and secondly,
expanding the .ph domain to represent phone companies. A
letter of inquiry is being sent to ICANN to seek clarification
on the extent to which a government can be involved in the
decision to commercialise its ccTLD, when it is being
administered by a private entity.
Irish
bid for .eu registry
An
Irish-led consortium is being assembled to bid for the
operation of the proposed European Union top-level domain
registry. This would see the registry being run from an Irish
base, and controlling the use of the .eu domain.
The
European Parliament and the Council of Ministers are due to
consider and vote on a concrete proposal for the .eu domain in
the next two months. If approved, the European Commission will
invite tenders to operate the central registry. However there
is still the issue of ICANN approval which so far has failed
to issue the .eu TLD on the grounds that it is not a specific
country and therefore cannot register .eu as a country-code
TLD.
2.
Industry Update
Domain
group to mediate .au
The
Australian Domain Authority (auDA) has formed a dispute
resolution working group made up of members of its
competition model and name policy advisory panels.
The
authority said the group is responsible for developing a
dispute resolution framework for the .au domain. The
authority is Australia’s industry self-regulatory body for
the .au country-code domain.
Domain
names now in 350 languages
Verisign
last week announced that it had added support for an
additional 180 languages, bringing the total number of
languages available in which to register domain names to
more than 350; languages used by approximately 80% of the
world’s population. These include some of the more
‘obscure’ world languages, such as Cherokee, Neo-Aramaic
and Bengali. The new domains allow users in countries whose
languages do not rely on the Roman alphabet to create and
register domains in their native writing systems.
Addresses
can even contain symbols such as smiley faces, signs of the
zodiac and copyright circles.
The
multilingual program however, is not yet final and some
domains registered now might be invalidated when the program
is finalised.
Since
multilingual domain names were first made available in
November, more than 800,000 non-English names have been
claimed, with the highest number in Chinese, Japanese and
Korean.
During
testing, the multilingual testbed names will be
differentiated from regular domain names by the suffix
"mltbd.com". While VeriSign moves forward with its
plans, several obstacles may stand in the way of a
successful and timely resolution of testing and fully
functioning multilingual domain names. No company can
guarantee the future ownership of multilingual domain names
until the testing phase is completed.
3.
NetNames
News
NetNames
is putting the finishing touches to its print publication
N3, sister publication of N3Lite. Watch out for a pdf
version of the magazine appearing on the www.netnames.com
web site next week.
4.
Fact of the Week
Non-English
speakers will make two-thirds of all Internet users by 2003.
5.
Tip of the Week
Many country-code top level
domains with ‘unusual’ suffixes are opening themselves
up to the general public, since their domestic markets are
too small to earn good money from.
If you run a music site, you
might like to consider the .mu (Mauritius) domain suffix.
.am (Armenia) and .fm (Federal States of Micronesia) are
suffixes naturally favoured by radio stations, and .tv
(Tuvalu) an obvious multimedia ending. .to (Tonga) is a
popular site used for redirection purposes.
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