Since the French language contains lots of words with accents, it isn’t so strange Afnic is considering this option. Currently the registry is carrying out a survey amongst their registrars to check how many interest there would be for such domain names.

The .fr registry isn’t the only registry considering this idea, also DNS.be (.be registry) is thinking about this option. For other extensions such as .eu, .lu and .com it’s already possible to register names which contain non-Latin characters. Other extensions even offer IDN extension, like for instance the .РФ-extension for Russia.

Everyone who’s interested to do so, can file an application via this website until April 12th 2012. You TLD doesn’t need to meet certain conditions, however there are certain things which aren’t allowed (for instance .job won’t be allowed because of its resemblance with .jobs which is already an existing extension). As it looks now, ICANN will only approve a maximum of 500 applications.  If there are filed more, priority will be given to those who seem to have a big basis and which have everything technically and legally worked out.

Below you’ll find an overview of the different steps you’ll need to take and fees that apply when filing such an application:

- ICANN evaluation fee: $185.000
This is what you pay ICANN to evaluate your application. In some cases, a partial refund of this amount is possible if you decide to quite before the end of the process. But otherwise this amount is non refundable even if your application is rejected

- Yearly ICANN fee: $ 25.000
This is a fixed cost per year. If you create over 50.000 sub domains under your TLD, you need to add $0,25 per sub domain

- Submitting a legal file: do take into account an amount of 4 or 5 zero’s
To submit a successful file, the best thing to do is to work with an agency that knows the legal aspects of such applications. Half of your application consists of a questionnaire on how legal affairs are dealt with.

On top of that, you still need to take into account the entire back-end. While it might initially seem so, this is much more than providing a few nameservers. ICANN imposes very strict rules on the uptime you need to achieve and you need to synchronize your data with an escrow service and so on. For a TLD under which only a few domain names will be created, there are products on the market for only a ‘few’ 10.000 euro’s. If you wish to register domain names under your TLD, you need to count €100.000 and more per year just for the technical realisation of the project.

So now it’s wait and see who files an application although many cities seem interested. Large companies also seem to find this an interesting project but for them it would be a prestige project.

A very interesting result of this investigation also showed that almost 90% of the domain names being re-registered close after their expiration were being put up for sale by their new owner. So only a small amount of the domain names were put into actual use. This means that every year over 10.000 interesting .be domain names are registered by somebody who doesn’t actually use the domain name, but hopes to be able to sell it for a large fee to somebody who does have an actual use for the name.

Dns.be has from their start about 10 years ago, always tried to prevent such registrations, which is also known as ‘warehousing’ (buying large amounts of domain names, preventing others to use them, hoping to be able to sell some of them for a larger amount). They for example forbid direct .be-registrars to warehouse. And they tried to prevent people from getting hold of lists of domain names that would become available for registration soon. But specialised companies have since a while now been able to create pretty accurate lists of domain names that would become available and warehousing companies simply work with external .be-registrars to register their .be domain names. Like that, the warehousing company itself is not bound to the “no warehousing” clause in the .be-registrar contract.

So the .be-registry finds that it’s time for some now procedure to be put into place to better prevent warehousing activities. What these procedures will be isn’t known yet. While the registry is considering whether they could implement some technical hurdles to make warehousing less easier, it is assumed that most of those hurdles will simply be bypassed shortly after they are put into place. One of the other possibilities thought of is to charge a larger amount for domain names that are only just becoming available again or maybe auctioning such domain names like the .nu-registry does. Since the .be-registry is a not for profit organisation, extra income generated by such procedures might for example be given to a charity.

As we could expect, several .xxx names have been registered by cybersquatters since the go-live of the .xxx domain which started on December 6th 2011. Some examples of such names are businessweek.xxx, cnbc.xxx, geocities.xxx, nextag.xxx, snapfish.xxx, verizonwireless.xxx, washingtonpost.xxx, and gayroom.xxx. These names were blocked rather unexpectedly by the registry a few days ago. Stuart Lawley, CEO of the .xxx registry declares the following: ‘We have included in our policy that the registry may take action against cybersquatters and we’ve set the bar very high. We won’t tolerate any infringement on intellectual property by cybersquatters,’ Lawley says.

Domainincite now wonders whether the registry hasn’t done more harm than good by blocking those names. First of all it isn’t clear whether all the names that were blocked also infringe a trademark. Moreover it’s possible that some other trademark owners won’t be very pleased with this action. During sunrise B, which ran from September 7th until October 28th, trademark owners were encouraged to block their registered trademark under .xxx but they needed to pay in order to do so. Now it turns out that when a cybersquatter registers your name, your name is also blocked by the registry for free.

Also another question pops up. Will the blocked domain names ever again be released for registration? Take gayroom.xxx for example. This name also exists under the .com version, it’s a porn website and the owner of the name gayroom.com also owns the trademakr ‘gayroom’. However, this person decided not to register the .xxx version of its name. As you could expect, a cybersquatter did register gayroom.xxx. The name was then blocked by the registry. Question is whether the owner of gayroom.xom will be able to register the .xxx version if he ever wants to or will this name be blocked forever since a cybersquatter registered it first?

Moreover we’ll also have to wait and see which action we might expect in the future against cybersquatting under the .xxx domain. The registry also created a special procedure, the so called RES (Rapid Evualation Service), which allows owners of trademarks to file a complaint if their names was registered by a cybersquatter under .xxx. Via this procedure, it will quickly be verified whether the trademark is indeed infringed. If this is the case, the name will be blocked. Question is how successful this procedure will be since it isn’t for free.

And last but not least one can ask the question which role the registry itself plays towards the cybersquatters. A cybersquatter has the intent to sell the domain name, which he registered in bad faith, for a lot of money to the owner of the trademark. Before the sunrise began, the registry decided to block several name as so called ‘premium names’. Those names couldn’t be registered by anyone and can be sold later by the registry amongst the members of the Sponsored Community to the highest bidder. A few examples of such names are poker.xxx and big.xxx. Since those names were blocked by the registry, it wasn’t possible for the owners of those trademarks to register those names during the sunrise. One could ask the question what’ the difference between the registry trying to sell a premium domain despite several sunrise applications and the cybersquatter registering gayroom.xxx hoping to catch a lot of money by selling this name to the trademark owner.

The current procedure works as follows: If you wish to transfer a .eu-name, the current owner will receive an email from the registry, once the transfer has been launched, asking him/her to confirm the transfer. If you launch a trade for a .eu-name, both the current and the new owner will receive an email from the registry asking them to confirm this trade. Once the confirmation has been given by the involved parties for either trade or transfer, EURid first carries out a manual verification of the requested transfer or trade and then (if everything is okay) completes the request. This means that .eu transfers or trades are only completed during office hours.

After an enquiry during November 2011 amongst the registrar community, EURid now checks whether it would be interesting to change the current procedure. This means that the system of confirming via email would disappear and they would switch to using an authorisation code, a so-called EPP key. Specifically this would mean that the current owner needs to ask his current registrar to provide him this code and the current owner then needs to send this code to the new registrar (for a transfer) or to the new owner (for a trade). If it’s a trade, the new owner then needs to send this code to the new registrar. There will no longer be a manual verification by EURid in the new procedure. Once the new registrar has received the auth code and forwarded it to the registry, the transfer is instantly completed.

This makes the new procedure resemble almost exactly that of for example .nl or .de transfers and look very much alike to that of for example .be and even a bit like that of all generic extensions like .com, .net, …

With the old procedure, EURid was more involved in the complete process and this made it easy for owners of domain names to transfer away their name even if the current registrar registrar was unwilling to cooperate. The new procedure normally does require cooperation of the current registrar, but EURid has foreseen a back-up for such events. The owner of the domain name will for example be able to easily request an auth code via de website from EURid, which will then be sent to the e-mail address shown in the Whois. And if that e-mail address isn’t correct, then they will be able to request the auth code via a signed fax to the registry.

If the registry doesn’t receive major objections against this proposal, they expect the documentation for those new procedures will be completed around June 2012. The new procedures would then be implemented around the end of 2012.

We’ll keep you updated once there is more news on this.

The landrush for those extensions, which started at 10am (GMT+1) this morning, went smoothly. Below you’ll find some more information about the extensions which have become available today:

• .re: The extension for La Réunion, which is an island with a population of about 800,000 people and is located in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Registrations under .re are were only allowed to people living on La Réunion.
• .yt: The extension for Mayotte. Also an island in the Indian Ocean. Population is about 200.000 people. Registrations under .yt were not possible.
• .pm: The TLD for Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a group of small islands in the North Atlantic Ocean with less then 10.000 in habitants. Also for this TLD, registrations were previously not possible. There might turn out to be some interest in the new TLD once it becomes available, since “PM” is an abbreviation that can mean a number of things. Modules written in the programming language Perl use .pm as there file extension. But it’s also used for “Product Management”, “Private Message” and obviously it also is used to indicate that a certain hour is in the afternoon.
• .wf: Wallis and Futuna, situated in the South Pacific near Tuvalu, which is best known for it’s TLD .tv and the fact that it might sink under sea level due to sea levels rising. Also .wf is new to the market.
• .tf: French Southern and Antarctic Lands which actually has no permanent population next to military personnel, scientific researchers and support staff.

From now on, you don’t need to have a local address in France anymore in order to be able to register a .fr domain name. An address within the European Union will now be sufficient.

This also means that .fr domain names will become cheaper. Each .fr-namen can now be registered without local presence meaning the extra cost for the use of a local address in France won’t be charged any longer.

If you register a .eu-name between November 24th 2011 and December 25th 2011 you can win an iPad2. On December 2nd, 9th, 16th and 23rd, EURid will draw a winner out of the registrations of the previous week. On January 27th, the final draw will take place and 2 extra iPads will be distributed.

So don’t hesitate any longer, register your .eu-name right now and treat yourself or your customers at a nice extra present under the Christmas tree!

So better think twice before you buy a fancy .co domain name assuming you have dug up gold. Many visitors will actually end up on the .com-version of the name you just bought. And in your case, that .com might even be run by your competitor.