Nominet to release ultra-short .uk domains this year

Nominet, the .uk registry, today outlined its plan to start releasing one and two-character .co.uk domains before the end of 2010.
The launch plan comprises two sunrise periods and a landrush. Contested applications in all three phases will be settled by an auction, with profits going to the Nominet Trust.
The first sunrise is for holders of UK-enforceable trademarks, when the mark was registered and in use in the UK before January 1, 2008. The second will allow holders of unregistered rights to participate.
The landrush will be open to all. Applications will be handled by approved .uk registrars.
Nominet said it plans to publish the launch timeline in more detail on November 1, but that the first sunrise will open before the end of the year.
The list of names to be released is published here (pdf). It includes all 10 digits and all 26 letters of the alphabet under .co.uk, .net.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk, with the exception of u.net.uk, which is already registered.
The vast majority of two-character combinations will also be released under all four of these 2LDs, with the exception of a handful of old registrations such as bt.co.uk and existing 3LD namespaces such as ac.net.uk.
Domains matching existing two-letter country-code TLDs do not appear to be exempt.

.SO launch date is November 1

.SO Registry, the manager of Somalia’s .so country-code top-level domain, has named November 1 as the opening date for sunrise registrations.
The launch plan has been published here. Until the weekend, the organization has just said that it would open in autumn.
The ccTLD is to be unrestricted, along the same lines as .co, but the launch schedule is a little different to the one offered by .CO Internet, with no phases running in parallel.
Trademark holders can file sunrise applications, which will cost a minimum of $90 for a three-year registration, for the month of November. Domains with multiple applications will be auctioned in the first half of December.
Landrush applications will run from December 16 to February 9 at $10 per year. Contested domains will be auctioned February 10 to 28. General availability is slated for March 1, 2011, also with a registry fee of $10.
Other than that, there’s scant information currently available on the .SO Registry web site. Notably, there’s currently nothing about UDRP or other dispute resolution procedures.
The ccTLD has been delegated to Somalia’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications since April 2009, but the registry is reportedly being handled by GMO Registry, the Japanese company already tapped to handle Canon’s .canon and its own .shop application.

The .CO launch, by the numbers

The .co top-level domain is now live and open for general registrations, following a well-planned and self-evidently successful launch period.
The TLD is the country-code for Colombia, but it’s being sold as a generic alternative to .com by .CO Internet.
Here’s the story of the launch, explained with numbers:

27,000 – approximate number of active .com.co registrations made before the start of 2010, under the previous, much more restrictive regime (source).
5,000 – roughly how many of these .com.co registrants chose to participate in sunrise grandfathering, which would allow them to grab the equivalent .co domain before anybody else (source).
100 – number of brands on .CO Internet’s Specially Protected Marks List. These 100 companies, selected by Deloitte, had their brands placed on a registry-reserved list during the launch period.
83 – brands on the SPML who had chosen to register their .co names by the time the sunrise closed (source). Companies on the SPML who continue to decline their domain will see their brand released back into the pool.
10 – registrars initially approved to take .co registrations. Many more companies are selling the domains, but they’re all acting as resellers for these 10. More registrars will be approved in future.
225 to 335 – price in US dollars of a sunrise registration for trademark holders (source).
11,000 – approximate number of sunrise registrations
1,500 – approximate number of rejected sunrise applications (source)
27,905 – applications made during the landrush (source)
451 – landrush applicants applying for 10 or more domains
2,523 – domains receiving more than one landrush application. These domains will now be offered at auction. (source)
133 – number of countries where landrush applicants resided
350– Fortune 500 companies that have registered their trademarks under .co as of today
81,000 – the price in US dollars of the first .co domain to be auctioned, the single-letter e.co. The domain sold on Sedo to Bookmarks.com on June 10 (source)
350,000 – price in US dollars of the biggest seller to date, the single-letter o.co. The domain was sold to Overstock.com, directly by the registry, earlier this week. (source)
91,613 – registrations in the first 12 minutes of general availability, which started at 6pm UTC yesterday. (source)
216,159 – currently active registrations as of 10am UTC today, 16 hours into general availability (source)
? – number of .co domains still active July 22, 2011.

Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments and I’ll add your data to the list.

.CO sunrise sees gaming attempts

.CO Internet has published a list of over 1,500 domains that were rejected during its two-month-long trademark-protection sunrise period for the .co namespace.
While the document does not break down the reasons why each name was rejected, it appears to list some attempts to game the system by registering non-existent trademarks or trademarks belonging to other entities.
It’s a 48-page document, compiled by Deloitte, but the range of rejected domains can be illustrated without leaving the C’s.
Names that were applied for and rejected despite being household names include the likes of circuitcity.co, compusa.co, comet.co and currys.co, all electronics retailers, and chevrolet.co.
Since these are names for which trademarks certainly do exist, I’m drawing the conclusion that the sunrise applicant was not the owner of the trademark.
There were also attempts to register personal names, such as christopher.co and courtney.co, as well as geographical terms, such as coventry.co, cleveland.co and chennai.co.
One wildly optimistic applicant even took a chance on colombia.co.
Some applicants went after the .co variants of popular .com web sites, such as chucknorrisfacts.co and collegehumor.co.
In terms of generic terms, applications were rejected for the likes of coffeehouse.co and countrymusic.co.
All of these names, and 1,500 more from the list, will be released back into the landrush period, in which anybody can attempt to register them, a few hours from now.
The recently extended landrush period ends this Friday. General availability begins next week.
Hat tip to Key-Systems, which released the list earlier today.

Which top brands turned down their .co domains?

Playboy, Pepsi and Pizza Hut are among 17 of the world’s top 100 brands that did not use the .co sunrise period to register their trademarks as .co domain names.
This is effectively the first empirical data we have to judge the demand for a Globally Protected Marks List along the lines of that which ICANN was toying with for its new TLD program.
.CO Internet, the registry operator behind the newly liberalized Colombian top-level domain, chose to implement a Specially Protected Marks List as one of several IP-protection mechanisms.
The list, maintained by Deloitte, comprises the 100 trademarks thought to be the most valuable, and the most rigorously defended, on the internet.
All of these marks, which include some generic dictionary words, are classified as registry reserved and will be impossible to register unless you are the trademark owner.
Yet 83 of the companies on the list chose to register their names in the .co sunrise anyway.
This may show that famous brands are more interested in owning a name that resolves, rather than merely defensively registering in order to keep their marks out of the hands of cybersquatters.
I can only speculate as to why these 83 chose to participate in the sunrise.
Two obvious reasons are the need to establish a Colombian presence on the internet, and the desire to capture any typo traffic from people miskeying “.com”.
For both these reasons, the data is probably not a reliable indicator of how these companies would act during a generic TLD sunrise.
Of the 100 marks on the Deloitte list, these are the 17 that have so far chosen not to acquire their domains:

Accenture, Accor, Armani, Blackberry, BMW, Carrefour, Dell, Fedex, Ferrari, General Electric, Nivea, Pedigree, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Playboy, Prada, Reebok, Sanyo, SAP, Sheraton, Tiffany and Total.

Because these are registry-reserved names, there’s no danger of cybersquatters picking them up when .co goes to general availability in a little under 11 days.
UPDATE 2010-07-13: See the comment from .CO Internet below. It seems the SPM list is not as useful for brand holders as I had thought.

.CO landrushers will be able to apply for trademark rejects

The landrush for .co domains will be extended by three days, to give people a chance to apply for strings that were rejected during the sunrise period, according to a registrar.
Key-Systems posted the news to its Facebook page earlier, but the .CO web site has yet to be updated with the same info.
The registrar said that the landrush, in which registrants apply for premium, non-trademarked strings, will now end on Friday, July 16 at 1600 UTC.
It also raised the prospect of a mini-spike in landrush applications in the last few days of the period.
Key-Systems said that domains covered by invalid sunrise applications – claimed trademarks which were rejected for one reason or another – will come up for grabs on July 12.
The list of such names, which could disclose the kind of bogus trademark claims made by those trying to game the system, will make very interesting reading. It’s due to be published July 10.

How a company hacked the .eu sunrise to register generic domains

An Austrian company exploited a loophole in EurID’s .eu sunrise period to register dozens of generic .eu domain names, according to the European Court of Justice.
An outfit by the name of Internetportal und Marketing GmbH noticed back in 2005 that European Union regulations covering the .eu launch said that trademarks containing “special characters” could be claimed under the .eu sunrise.
If your trademark contained characters not compatible with normal DNS, such as $ or #, you could ignore those characters when you applied for your trademark as a .eu sunrise period domain.
So, with ingenuity I have to grudgingly admire, Internetportal registered 33 trademarks in Sweden that comprised generic dictionary terms interspersed with those special characters.
By applying under the sunrise period, rather than during the landrush or open registration periods, the company could eliminate most of its competitors for the domain.
Crafty.
The ECJ case concerned the domain reifen.eu – meaning “tyre” “or “tire” in German – but the company apparently also applied to register 180 other generic domains using the same method.
Internetportal registered the trademark “&R&E&I&F&E&N&”, knowing that the ampersands would be ignored by EurID’s policy when it applied for reifen.eu.
It did in fact win the domain, and others, during the sunrise, on the back of its Swedish trademarks.
Unfortunately, a man named Richard Schlicht who held a (later) Benelux trademark on the term “reifen” filed a Alternative Dispute Resolution procedure over the registration in 2006 and won.
Internetportal appealed, and it eventually made its way to ECJ. But Europe’s highest court decided last week that reifen.eu had indeed been registered in bad faith and in violation of the rules.
There’s loads of stuff in the ruling to excite IP lawyers, but as far as I can tell it boils down to one basic common-sense precedent: if you register a trademark purely for the purposes of securing a domain name in a sunrise period, you’re out of luck, at least in Europe.
Given that pretty much all the dictionary terms under .eu have already gone, and that the sunrise period ended years ago, I doubt the finding will have a great deal of immediate practical impact.
But a more general point holds, for those considering applying for a new TLD: if there are loopholes in your sunrise period rules, you can guarantee they will be exploited.