Britain Short Domains For Sale
Britain's Nominet, the registry for .uk domain, announced the sunrise period for some of the previously reserved short .uk domains. The list primarily consists of 1-character and 2-letter names, topped by certain names that were not available before - i.e. travel.net.uk or pro.co.uk.
Domain sale is to undergo three stages. The sunrise period, launched at December 1, 2010, allows trademark owners registering corresponding domains, while those who do not own the trademark but can provide the evidence of bona fide use on the UK on or before 1 January 2008 can apply during the following Unregistered Rights phase. Nominet also incurs certain non-refundable fees for each submitted domain owing to rights validation service. These should be paid along with registrar fees. The beginning of the Landrush phase, as well as of the Unregistered Rights Sunrise phase, is yet to be announced.
In case Nominet receives two or more submissions for each short .uk domain, open auctions will follow. The same rules apply to each of the three stages.
.DE Leads Its Way In Terms Of Numbers
.DE — Germany's top level domain — passed the 14-million registrations mark, being the world's largest and leaving China behind.
As the number of registrations in .cn declined from 14 million in February 2009 to today's 6 million, owing both to changes in registration policies and to the end of 1-yuan domain name sale, .de has secured itself as the headliner in terms of numbers.
At the moment, the leaderboards among the world's largest ccTLDs — are led by .de (14 million domain names), which is followed by .uk (United Kingdom, 8,8 million registrations), then by .cn (China, 6 million) and .nl (Netherlands, 4 million domain names). .eu, the ccTLD for European Union, and Russia's .ru follow with 3,3 million and 3,1 million registered domain names, correspondingly.
VeriSign Enables DNSSEC For Its Partners
VeriSign has launched a service to ease the implementation of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). The service is targeted at registrars to ease the complex DNSSEC implementing process. DNSSEC is a protocol which provides an additional layer of security to the Internet by protecting against cache poisoning and man-in-the-middle attacks, where forged data is used to redirect users to fraudulent websites. VeriSign's DNSSEC Signing Service can be used both for the initial signing of second-level domain names and for periodic resigning, as well as the ongoing management of keys associated with the DNSSEC protocol. As VeriSign states, the benefits of the new service can be enjoyed without the need to invest in additional hardware and human resources to sign and manage domains.
VeriSign offers evaluation period to its registrar partners; the offer is valid through the end of 2011.
