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Confusion in the Dutch namespace
Wednesday, August 27. 2008
When you run a blog such as this one, where the author gives a personal view of the industry he's in, it's hard to decide whether you should talk about competitors or not.
I don't want to be second-guessing other people's professional decisions, but I do feel I can comment on them at times.
So it is with .CO.NL. The domain was bought by Eurodns and they've decided to market it as an extension in its own right. Now I can understand the allure for registrars in having and running their own extensions, but I must admit I don't get .CO.NL. There's already an official .NL and top level domains are always more desirable and usable than second level domains (i.e. I'd rather have INDOM.NL than INDOM.CO.NL).
The .CO.NL guys' pitch is that, because there's a local presence requirement for .NL, people will be able to project a Dutch image through CO.NL while bypassing the local presence rule.
The minute I saw that I thought: recipe for disaster!
When national registries set up their rules, they do so for a reason. Whether you agree with the rules or not, you know the registries will frown on people who attempt to go around these rules.
And it's not only registries. Most countries have a lot of pride in their national suffixes. From governments to Internet end-users, feelings towards a country's suffix can often be as passionate as they are for the national flag or anthem. That's why national registries are generally not-for-profit organizations chosen by governments. They are supposed to work for their national Internet community, not try to make money running on-the-side schemes that dilute the country's official suffix.
So I wasn't surprised by an email I got this morning entitled "CO.NL and SIDN : A clarification". Sent by the CO.NL guys, it attempts to reaffirm the distinction between Holland's real national suffix (run by SIDN, the national registry) and the CO.NL operation.
You don't need to read between the lines a lot to understand that there's probably been a lot of flak from the Dutch authorities over this. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if SIDN created a new rule to ban CO.NL in the near future. It would certainly take more than an email to convince them not to.
The funny thing is that, a few years ago, Eurodns had already got themselves in a jam by trying to circumvent local presence rules. That was with .FR, the French national suffix. Eurodns thought it would be a good idea to allow their customers to register .FR names even if they didn't meet the French registry (AFNIC) imposed criteria. How? By registering themselves as the owner of the domains.
Needless to say AFNIC didn't take kindly to this. It led to the first major case of a registrar being sanctioned by AFNIC and has tainted Eurodns' image in France ever since.
This being the case, I am surprised they would try something along the same lines again. It will be interesting to see how CO.NL pans out.
If you don't have the admin contact, some registrars will provide one, usually for free.
Basically everyone can register a .nl so there is not need for a workaround.
I agree that .co.nl will not work given that .nl is highly popular and established.
.co.nl will fail even more miserably than the .co.ee Eurodns tried to pitch in the past o:)
... En juin dernier, un registrar europeen, titulaire du .co.nl a annoncé la commercialisation de sous domaines en .co.nl. La commercialisation de sous-domaines n'est pas interdite mais l'annonce du service en plein ICANN meeting prête à confusion...
Tracked: Aug 29, 12:14