The launch date for .eu has been announced. The launch of .eu will happen in several phases: a Sunrise period, divided into two phases; where owners of "prior rights" will be allowed to register their names, and a Land rush period. Phase I of Sunrise will start 7 December 2005. This phase will run for 2 months and Sunrise II will start 7 February 2006 and run for another two months. Open registrations (Land Rush), where registrations will be open to everyone starts 7 April 2006.

Negotiation on the proposed Top Level Domain (TLD) .xxx , which is a top level domain for the adult industry has hit a snag. ICM Registry, the organisation that will regulate the provision of the .xxx TLD would have to agree to further contractual stipulations before it can get ICANN go-ahead for the new TLD.

The first batch of .job domains are expected to go live in October 2005, this are the .job domains applied for during the startup period. .Job is now available for registration by the general public.

European Parliament proposed .kid TLD

The European Parliament proposed the creation of a new domain with the extension .kid Top Level Domain (TLD) specifically for children. Content of websites in .kid would be independently monitored on a regular basis and would automatic filtering against adult contents will be filtered.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the delegation of .eu generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) and authorised their CEO to enter into an agreement with EURid. The next stage is for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to put .eu into the root Domain Name System (DNS) servers.

Dot hu (.hu) domain names will be available for EU businesses and citizens from 1st March 2005, .hu (Hungarian) domains (including second-level domains such as .co.hu and .org.hu) A Hungarian registered trademark will no longer be necessary.

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in India has approved the transfer of .IN registry management and operations to the National Internet Exchange of India(NIXI). IN Registry is now the official .IN registry.

IN Registry does not carry out registrations itself. Instead, it accredits registrars, which then accept registration requests from end users.

Source: ncst.ernet.in

The UK domain name registry Nominet has witness a step rise in the number of attempts to register names that already exist, it has grown from an average of 20,000 attempts per day to 80,000. This has significantly reduced the performance of Nominet's Automaton system.

The new Anti-abuse policy will reduce the number of request operations and query operations, for domains that already exists to a daily limit of 1,000 operations rather than individual limits of 1,000 per day.

This new policy implementation will go live on 4th January 2005.

WIPO has decided that Microsoft is not entitled to a Spanish software company's domain name, mocosoft.com. The panel decided that "moco" is not phonetically close enough to "micro" to use the precedent set by past rulings.

Nominet have received a formal complaint from technology company Apple relating to the itunes.co.uk domain name, which was registered by Benjamin Cohen, managing director of CyberBritain Holdings, on 7th November 2000.

Apple claims an entitlement to the domain, but some are of the opinion that their chances are slim.

"iTunes" was only published in the Trade Marks Journal on 6th December, 2000, after the domain name had already been registered. Mr Cohen allegedly had no idea that Apple was intending to build the iTunes service at the time of his registration, and claims that he has been making legitimate use of the domain since registration.