Policy Observatory

The Stockholm District Court decided to order the seizure of two key domains owned by The Pirate Bay, however it is unlikely that the site's operation will disappear completely. The motivation for the seizure is that The Pirate Bay is an illegal operation, thus its domains are tools used by the site to infringe copyright.

While two of the domains (ThePirateBay.se - the site’s main domain and PirateBay.se - a lesser used alternative) will be will be put out of action, the District Court dismissed the prosecution’s case against Punkt.se, the organization responsible for Sweden’s top level .SE domain.

The Czech .CZ domain administrator CZ.NIC Association undertakes biannual surveys at the domain holders (individuals as well as companies) in which the respondents are asked whether they wish to implement IDN (Internationalized domain name) within the .CZ domain. CZ.NIC is ready from a technical point of view for the implementation of IDN; however, it has not implemented IDN in .CZ domains yet since the Internet user community in the Czech Republic (individuals as well as organizations) did not show much interest in the implementation of IDN.  If the IDN was deployed, the web addresses within the .CZ domain could contain Czech letters with diacritic.

The regular biannual survey started in 2004. The support of IDN implementation has been continually dropping from 45 % to 32 % (in 2014) in case of individuals while the support from companies has been slightly growing. However, it is still significantly poor - with less than 20 % (in 2014) in favour of IDN.

See whole article with survey results and possible impact issues here (the only Czech IDN domain in use).

The main domain registrar in Romania, ROTLD, which is under the management of the country’s National Research and Development Institute in IT (ICI Bucharest), announced in the beginning of June it was updating its software, allowing diacritical marks in domain names.

Berne will host the first Swiss Internet Governance Forum (Swiss-IGF) on 19 May. Among the themes selected by the organisers is an introduction to the new .swiss internet domain. This will give participants the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the conditions and processes for allocating domain names before the launch of .swiss in the autumn.

The new Ordinance on Internet Domains (passed by the Federal Council on 5 November 2014) imposing a separation between the functions of registry and registrar (both performed by SWITCH so far) entered into force in January 2015. On 20 March 2015, OFCOM and SWICH renewed their contract for the management of ‘.ch’ until mid-2017, allowing for a gradual transfer of ‘.ch’ holders to other marketers of domain names.