.so leaves GMO for local provider, hikes prices

The Somalian government has switched registry provider for its .so ccTLD from GMO Registry to soNIC, apparently a local provider.
The IANA records for .so were updated yesterday to indicate that Mogadishu-based soNIC is now the technical contact.
According to the current GMO-managed registry web site, new registrations were halted June 9 and will reopen at some point after July 8, when soNIC takes over.
In the meantime, renewal prices have been cranked up.
The .so domain opened up worldwide in late 2010, having been delegated the previous year.
The new registry tried to ride the wave created by .co’s launch a few months earlier, with middling results.
soNIC will evidently “ramp up abusive use monitoring and enforcement of acceptable use policies”. I wonder if that involves anti-piracy measures (sorry).
At the time the ccTLD launched, I noted that Somalia was pretty much the worst place in the world to live.
But, just as the new registry plans to clean up its namespace, the nation itself has started to clean up its act somewhat in the meantime. It’s now only number two on the Failed State Index.

Sunrise for .so domains starts tonight

.SO Registry, manager of the internet’s newest open-doors top-level domain, will open its systems for sunrise registrations in a few hours, at midnight UTC.
The TLD is the country code for the Republic of Somalia, the mostly lawless east-African nation that is broadly recognized as a failed state.
For that reason, among others, the .so namespace is not likely to be as attractive to registrants as, say, the recent relaunch of Colombia’s .co.
Another reason, perhaps coupled to the fact that .so doesn’t really have a comparable English semantic value to .co, is that the registry appears to have done a rather poor job of publicizing the launch.
There has been no media activity as far as I can tell, and its web site does not currently list its approved registrars.
Key-Systems has press-released its involvement, and a quick Twitter poll earlier today revealed that EuroDNS, Blacknight and NetNames are also among the signed-up.
The back-end for the registry is being handled by Japanese operator GMO Registry.
During the trademarks-only sunrise period, which runs until November 30, companies have to commit to a minimum three-year registration, with a registry fee of $90, cheaper than most sunrise phases.
The .so registry has taken on most of the same sunrise policies as .co – its rules were written by the same people – with the noteworthy exception of the Protected Marks List.
.SO Registry is also the first to require trademark holders use CHIP, the new Clearing House for Intellectual Property, a venture launched earlier this month by sunrise specialist Bart Lieben, who recently joined the law firm Crowell & Moring.
After contested sunrise applications are wound up with a Pool.com auction, a landrush will follow, from December 16 to February 9, 2011. General availability is scheduled to kick off March 1.
.SO Registry recently published its restricted names list (pdf), which appears to be made up mostly of English-language profanities, as well as religiously and sexually oriented terms.
The term “gay” is among the restricted terms.
The registry also appears to have “wildcarded” about 20 strings on its restricted list, including %vagina%, %penis% and %lesbian%.

.SO Registry copies .co launch policies

Somalia’s .SO Registry, which hopes to mimic a little of the success of .co when it starts accepting registrations in November, has adopted virtually identical launch policies.
The registry’s policy document (pdf), which appeared on its web site last week, does in fact appear to copy large chunks of text wholesale from .CO Internet’s equivalent paper (pdf).
(UPDATE: I’ve reason to believe this is because both documents share an author/editor)
For this reason, you can pretty much expect the same policies regarding the sunrise, landrush and general availability phases of the launch, which kicks off November 1.
It also means that .so domain names will be subject to the UDRP. The registry has evidently partnered with WIPO to administer these proceedings.
There are some differences between .co and .so, however.
Notably, .SO Registry has added a policy of allowing sunrise registrations for trademark typos, provided that the typo under another TLD has been won at UDRP or in court.
This basically appears to open the doors for any company that has won a .com domain in a UDRP case to register the equivalent .so, no matter how lunatic the UDRP decision was.
This is how the document describes the exception to the trademarks-only rule:

the Domain Name must be identical to a domain name which has been recovered by the Applicant or its authorized licensee in the context of a court, UDRP or other alternative dispute resolution procedure relating to that domain name in another top-level domain.

It’s followed by a comment, one of several apparently made by one of the document’s editors, that probably shouldn’t have been published on a public web site:

Comment Bart: we need to look at the allocation model here (rather hypothetical, but you never know): will they also go into auction if there are two applicants for the same domain name: one having the identical mark, and the other having the variant?)

Other differences include the fact that, unlike their Columbian counterparts, Somalians do not appear to get any special privileges, such as grandfathering or a priority sunrise phase.
There also does not to be a provision for a Specially Protected Marks list like the one .CO Internet used.
The registry’s policies will be governed by the laws of Japan, rather than Somalia (which, let’s face it, doesn’t have much in the way of a functional legal infrastructure).
.SO’s back-end is being handled by GMO Registry, the Japanese company that plans to apply for .shop and is working with Canon on its proposed .canon application.
I’ve previously reported on the roll-out time-line and pricing for the .so domain, here.

.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.