TLD.sc Your source of information on Top Level Domains

Facebook is trying to take away the domain facebook.nl from the Dutch owner. ‘They don’t have the right,’ says the owner, who wishes to remain unknown, ‘I’ve already registered facebook.nl earlier than they did!’ It’s now up to WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation), to make a ruling.

Mid 2008, Facebook already tried to buy the domain facebook.nl from the Dutchman. He refuses even though Facebook was offering him an amount of five figures. After this, everything became quiet, until a few days ago. Suddenly the Dutchman received a thick file from the lawyers of Facebook.

In this file the lawyers make clear they think facebook.nl is abusing the mark Facebook to make money out of advertisements. According to these lawyers, the site also referred to Stepstone.nl a while ago, an agency that apparentely pays third parties to link to website to Stepstone’s homepage.

The owner has very little faith he’ll win the case. A while ago the Spanish owner of facebook.es and the Australian owner of facebook.com.au also had to hand over their domain names to Mark Zuckerberg & co.

The Dutch domain manager however claims the Dutchman does stand a chance to win this case, because his domain already existed before Zuckerberg & co took Facebook.com into possession. ‘Facebook.nl was already registered in July 2005. Facebook.com was only bought in August 2005 for 200,000 dollars. Before that date they were working under the name Thefacebook.com. ‘ According to Facebook’s lawyers the Americans already had all the rights and trademark on Facebook in July 2005.

The Dutchman now waits impatiently for the WIPO ruling.

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A while ago, the .br registry (Brasil) announced the launch of the .net.br domain. Today the sunrise for this extension started. The sunrise will last for 6 months. During this period, everyone who owns a .com.br name, can register this name under the .net.br extension. There’s only one condition, the .com.br name needs to be registered before April 6th 2009. The sunrise ends on October 6th 2009.

The sunrise period will be followed by the landrush, which will start on October 27th 2009. During this period names will be registered on a first come, first served basis.

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Tuesday morning, around 8am, some servers of UltraDNS had serious problems. Some of their nameservers didn’t react anymore or answered very slowly. Because of this some of their customers also had serious problems. And UltraDNS does have, some important customers such as the .nu registry and Amazon.com. Besides they’re also the .biz and .us registry.

Around 8h50am Amazon.com switched servers to keep problems within the limits. The biggest issues were solved around 10am Tuesday morning.

However no one really knows what just happened. According to Dynect Platform, a competitor of UltraDNS, there are 2 possiblities. ‘It’s possible that UltraDNS was attacked from the outside or otherwise something went seriously wrong internally,’ says Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO of Dynect Platform.

Up until now, UltraDNS admits that something went wrong but doesn’t communicate about the difficult reach of some of their servers.

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Steve Ryan has been trying to register the names porn.ie and pornography.ie for nearly 4 years. His requests were always turned down by IEDR (the .ie registry). They say they won’t register those names because they are offensive. Ryan didn’t agree on this. He and his lawyer wrote several letters, in which he referred to the fact that these words are marked as offensive by the Oxford Dictionary (contrary to some other terms) and many parliamentary debates and laws in which the words porn and pornography are mentioned. However IEDR didn’t answer to those letters.

Therefore Ryan decided to go to court. The appeals court agreed the IEDR was wrong in stating the words porn and pornography are offensive. However Ryan doesn’t have a reason to be happy because the court agreed with IEDR’s refusal of registering the domain names. The court said that IEDR is the only body that administers the public resource that is the .ie Internet domain and can be considered as a sort of arbiter of public policy. ‘Some people may find the terms porn and pornography are offensive,’ judged the court ‘and therefore IEDR doesn’t need to register those names.’

Ryan is disappointed and doesn’t understand why the court gives IEDR the final say on what’s offensive and immoral. ‘So if you want to register an .ie domain name, your success depends on the will of IEDR,’ says Ryan.

In other countries these terms are also often mentioned as offensive. For instance, in Luxembourg it wasn’t possible to register a domain name that could be associated with porn or sex until 2001. Now you can apply for such a nae but only if the exact same name hasn’t been blocked before 2001. Names that have been blocked, remain blocked. One example of such an isolated name is porn.lu.

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