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.co.no is going to court

CoDNS (the .co.no-registry) has decided to sue Norid  (.no-registry). The reason for this is the continuing dispute between them concerning the .co.no extension.

A few months ago we already posted an article to inform you that the .co.no-registry was forced to postpone the release of the .co.no-extension since Norid had extra questions about this extension. The problem was the following. In 2001 the name .co.no was released for registration. It was then removed of the list of forbidden .no domain names. This name was registered in 2001 by the company ELINEWEB AS. After the advice of Norpol, the policy advisory board of the Norwegian registry, the name was put back on the list of forbidden names in 2009. At the time, all registrars were informed about this.

When a large scaled marketing campaign was started in 2009 to promote .co.no, the .no-registry decided to investigate this new extension. This investigation shows that ELINEWEB AS isn’t the company which will be offering registrations under the .co.no extension. And that’s the problem. A domain name which is mentioned on the list of forbidden names can’t be transferred to another registrar. Officially this didn’t happen. The Whois information of this name still shows ELINEWEB AS as the owner of this domain name. But the offering of registrations under this name has been outsourced to another company. That’s why Norid decided to check profoundly whether such outsourcing of services is legal.

After many conversations, meetings and conference calls, both parties didn’t reach an agreement. ‘We’ve hoped we would have been able to solve this problem in a amicable way,’ says Sander Scholten, the operational manager of CoDNS. ‘Despite the fact we’ve answered all questions from Norid profoundly, we haven’t reached an agreement. That’s why we are obliged to take legal action in order to protect our customers,’ he adds.

So the future of the .co.no extension keeps looking insecure. A release date for this extension remains unknown. However we would like to inform you that is already possible to register a Norwegian domain name under the .no extension. Some companies offer local presence under the .no extension which makes direct registrations under this extension not completely impossible for foreign companies.

October 2011
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