Norwegian-based cybersecurity company IQ Global AS must be good. This week they announced one of their long-term customers, the Swedish Internet Foundation, operator of the Swedish ccTLD .se, has bought a stake in the company, believed to be around 20%.
It’s 5 weeks until Nordic Domain Days in Stockholm, and registration is now open. The 2022 event will be held on 9 and 10 May at the Clarion Stockholm and will be, wait for it, in person!
DNS Belgium have published an interview with a student whose Master’s thesis was on detecting fake web shops in the .be domain with machine learning.
Registration for the 2022 Nordic Domain Days to be held in Stockholm in May 2022 has opened. The conference that focusses on the domain name industry in the five Nordic countries – Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, and let’s not forget the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland as well, is aimed as a means of discussing domain name issues for the Nordic region, and is aimed at registries, registrars, resellers, service providers and investors.
The Nordic Domain Days conference have confirmed dates for 2022 suggesting you clear your calendars and dust off your travel bags. On May 9 and 10, the Swedish capital Stockholm will be the centre of Nordic domain name issues.
The 2020 Nordic Domain Days has been postponed until further notice due to the COVID-19 situation. The fifth of the annual event for the Nordic domain name conferences was originally scheduled to be held in Stockholm in September, was postponed and now postponed indefinitely.
Although the European Union already has a lot on its hands as it confronts a new wave of COVID-19 infections and seeks to position itself for a sustainable recovery, it must not ignore another crisis looming on the horizon. The bloc is rapidly and inexcusably falling behind China and America in the digital transition.
Children who have suffered abuse, who were robbed of their childhood and instead carry guilt and shame … children who are at risk of future atrocities … it is for all these children that we are here today.
The Swedish ccTLD manager IIS has decided to offload its registrar business, .SE Direkt.
.SE Direkt, which has almost 122,000 .se domain names under management with 87,000 customers (almost 67,000 corporate and 21,000 private individual customers), sells domain names but doesnât offer additional services such as webhosting, which most registrars offer these days as a means of making money. The domain name registration business isnât particularly lucrative when it comes to profitability.
Domain names registered through .SE Direkt currently cost SEK270 (â¬26) (SEK216 excl. VAT). The price increased from SEK255 to 270 as of 1 October 2017. .SE Direkt’s market share is 7%, which has increased from 6.8% in 2016. There are currently 1,768,495 domain names for the Swedish country code top level domain.
.SE Direkt commenced operations in 2009 when the business model with registrars was established. The idea was that it would act as a stopgap and that domain name registrants would gradually switch to other registrars. The number of customers has not since declined at the expected rate, but is now after ten years down at a level that makes IIS believe the timing is right to no longer continue with the registrar business.
The transfer includes domain names and customer agreements with .SE Direkt and the possibility of a license to use .SE Direkt’s trademark and/or domain name for up to two years.
To ensure that the buyer has the necessary experience and skills required, IIS places, among other things, the requirement that the purchaser should be, or will become, a registrar. Indicative bids with responses to the âInformation for stakeholdersâ [pdf, Swedish only] must be submitted by 17 October 2018.
Companies letting their domain names expire are often finding e-shops are re-registering their domain names and using them to market trademark infringing, or counterfeit, goods. But there’s no correlation between the use of the domain name prior to the e-shop and what the e-shop sells.
The study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) [pdf], through the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights, was on online business models used to infringe intellectual property rights. The study found when domain names were available for re-registration the entities operating the e-shops would systematically re-register the domain names and shortly after set up e-shops marketing goods suspected of infringing upon the trademarks of others. It was a characteristic that the prior use of the domain names was completely unrelated to the goods being marketed on the suspected e-shops. There were examples of domain names previously used by politicians, foreign embassies, commercial businesses and many other domain name registrants.
The study was conducted in 2 phases. Phase one looked at .dk (Denmark) from October 2014 to October 2015. During this period 566 .dk domains were re-registered by suspected infringers of trademarks immediately after the domain names had been given up by their previous registrants and became available for re-registration. Phase 2 looked at Sweden, which as a Scandinavian country would be assumed comparable with Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom, which have very well-developed and large e-commerce sectors, and a country with a large e-commerce sector in southern Europe, Spain.
Phase 2 found the same phenomenon previously documented in Denmark also occurs in the Swedish, German, British and Spanish ccTLDs.
According to the study, the “total number of detected e-shops suspected of infringing the trade marks of others using a domain name under the ccTLD” ranged from 2.9% in .de (Germany) to 9.5% in .se (Sweden) while the “total number of detected e-shops suspected of infringing the trade marks of others using a domain name under the ccTLD where the domain name had been previously used by another registrant” ranged from 71.1 % of suspected e-shops in .uk (United Kingdom) to 81.0% in .es (Spain). The average was 5.41% across all ccTLDs in the study and 75.35% respectively.
Based on the research, the researchers believe it must be considered likely that the same also occurs in other European countries with well-developed e-commerce sectors.
An analysis of the 27,970 e-shops in the study identified a number of patterns including shoes were the product category most affected, accounting for two-thirds (67.5%) of the suspected e-shops and then clothes, accounting for 20.6%, while 94.6% of the detected suspected e-shops used the same specific e-commerce software.
Additionally, 40.78 % of the detected suspected e-shops in Sweden and the United Kingdom were registered through the same registrar, 21.3 % of all the e-shops used the same name server and a quarter (25.9%) of the suspected e-shops had the hosting provider located in Turkey, 19.3 % in the Netherlands and 18.3 % in the United States.
Even if the domain name was previously used for the marketing of goods, the study found the current e-shops were marketing a different type of product at the time of analysis. The study examined 40 case studies that indicated the sole reason for re-registration of the domain names is to benefit from the popularity of the website that was previously identified by the domain name. The benefits would include search engine indexing, published reviews of services and/or products and links from other websites that have not yet taken the current use into consideration. The case studies used also indicate a high degree of affiliation between the e-shops is likely. The research seems to indicate that what on the surface seems like thousands of unrelated e-shops are likely to be one or a few businesses marketing trade mark infringing goods to European consumers.
The 140 page study is available for download from:
https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/observatory/documents/reports/Research_on_Online_Business_Models_Infringing_IP_Rights.pdf