Loic Damilaville has been publishing DNS News from Paris for years. His thorough and comprehensive reports feature several long essays, occasional interviews, and news from all the top-level domains, a section he calls “Vie des Extensions” (Life of the Extensions). Loic is one of most knowledgable, reliable, and valuable sources of information about domain names; he deserves to be better known.

You can subscribe to his newsletter by going to the DNS News Pro website, or by writing to Loic (he reads and writes English extremely well) at contact at dnsnewpro dot com.

The only issue, for the English-reading audience, is that he writes in French; excellent French at that. If you do read French, though, this is one of the best domain name resources out there.

Some highlights from Loic’s latest newsletter (paraphrased, not translated):

.BE - Belgium DNS BE, the Belgian registry, claims that their registrations doubled in less than a year, and indeed they did, by giving away free domains in the fall 2005. By looking at their real-time stats, you can deduce that 525,381 of their names (53%) were given away free. Still, well done. The proof of the pudding will be when it comes time for renewal.

.CH - Switzerland The Swiss government wants 3 domain names, suisse.ch, schweiz.ch, and svizzere.ch, which correspond to the name of the country in three of its official languages: French, German, and Italian. The names are all held by a businessman who considers his own interests to be more important than those of the government.

If you have any clever domain hacks ending in .ch, now might be the time to try to get them. SWITCH, the Swiss registry, is reducing the price for .CH names by getting rid its CHF 40 (about $31) initiation fee; the CHF 35 annual charge will still apply.

.CN - China The Chinese NIC announced over 1 million domain names under .CN, something allowed to foreigners only (Chinese registrants have to register under one of the subdomains).

.ES - Spain The Spanish NIC has 297,000 names under registration, thanks in part to its opening up of the .ES TLD after years of some of the most byzantine bureaucracy on the planet. But old habits die hard: Mailclub.info reports (in French) on the horrific administration of the new “open” processes: sexo.es (”sex”) and banco.es (”bank”) were registered during the Sunrise period thanks to badly written rules; three separate and different lists of forbidden names (here are List 2 (PDF) and List 3 (146 pg PDF), which caused widespread anger and confusion; and finally unwritten and capricious rules for refusing certain names (espania.es was refused for being “too close” to espana.es).

For the view from Spain, see the blogs of Carlos Blanco Vasques, and Javier Maestre, a well-known Internet lawyer (both in Spanish).

.SU - Soviet Union The country is gone, but the extension remains. .SU continues to function, has about 5000 names in it, grew by 43.5% last year, and is run by the Foundation for Internet Development (mostly in Russian).

Finally, Loic calls our attention to a site set up by Microsoft to combat typosquatting. The site is full of interesting research, and some eyebrow-raising tidbits — for instance that a large number of typosquatted domains are parked at oingo.com (a.k.a. Applied Semantics), which was bought by Google and became the genesis of their Adsense program.

Thanks Loic!

Posted by Antony in: Domains