DENIC To Relax .DE Registration Rules Following VW Court Ruling

Posted on October 18th, 2009 by admin in Domain News | 1 Comment »

DENIC, the registry behind Germany’s .DE domain names, have announced that they will be relaxing their .DE domain registration rules from 23 October 2009. The news comes after a court in Frankfurt ruled in favour of Volkswagen in 2008 allowing Volkswagen to register the name VW.de.

Under previous DENIC rules, customers were not allowed to register domains without any letters or domains shorter than three letters. Before DENIC stopped the registration of short domain names years ago only three 2 letter domain names were registered by customers – IX.de, HQ.de and Deutsche Bahn’s DB.de.

As DMueller reports, following the court ruleing in June 2008, instead of simply allowing Volkswagen to register VW.de, DENIC have gone the more sensible route and will simply relax their rules for all customers.

DENIC plans to expand the German name space on October 23, 2009 allowing all .DE registrars a limited number of queries per minute to try and make sure everyone has an equal chance of getting these newly available domain names. However, some players have already found loopholes in this system – Sedo for example is pooling queries from various registrars therefore providing its customer base with a better chance of getting the domain name they want.

It will definitely be very interesting to see how things develop from here on in considering .DE is a powerful extension (currently 3rd in the world in terms of total domains registered after .Com and .CN) – interest in these newly made available domain names will definitely be high.

The Sedo auction can be found here.