A Spanish man is holding several government domain names for ransom until the Prime Minister agrees to correct the country’s “inequalities” in water supply and transfer water to all of the country’s drought stricken regions.

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Domain name entrepreneur Edwin Hayward issued a press release today announcing his company, MemorableDomains.com, sale of Britain.co.uk at the Internet World show in Earls Court at the end of April. According to the release the company will be offering over 2,000 of their top domain names for sale at the show including Maps.co.uk, Mum.co.uk, Dad.co.uk, SearchEngine.co.uk and TechnicalSupport.co.uk .

For those in the UK who are interested in attending Internet World , the show runs April 29, 2008 through May 1, 2008 and MemorableDomains.co.uk is located on Stand E277.  Find more info at InternetWorld.co.uk and MemorableDomains.co.uk

I have known Edwin for around 7 years and his .co.uk domain portfolio is enviable.  Good luck Edwin !

As Michele from BlackKnight reports, the .IE registry has just passed it’s 100,000th registration. The article also looks at available domains, expired domains and current registration procedures.

As CIRA, the operator of the .CA registry for Canada announced, the 1 millionth .CA domain was registered on April 13th, 2008. In order to celebrate this milestone, the registry has set up a new user story website at OneMillionDomains.ca.

[Press Release]

The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) has announced a series of reforms that will regulate domainers from registering any .au Second Level Domain for the sole purpose of reselling it.

The auDA board has set up guidelines to regulate domain sales in order to create transparency in the industry.

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An article reportedly in the print version of The Independent today claims that the domain name Cruises.co.uk was purchased by the UK travel company Cruise.co.uk for £560,000 or roughly $1.1 million US.

Just for fun : Here’s a view of how some in the “valley” see the deal.

In an article noted on Telecom.NL (subscription required) , Red.es has initiated a program to give away domains to anyone under the age of 30 in an effort to boost Spanish internet usage.

Under 30s in Spain can register a domain name for free, says the public institution responsible for promoting the internet. . . . .

The Spanish Consejo de Ministros adopted these measures to boost internet usage in Spain. Domain Name News is not fluent in Spanish but from the website, Red.es appears to be reporting that 5,000 people have taken advantage of this promotion already. A translated version of the article from the Red.es site can be found at this google link. Potential registrants can find more information about getting a domain at the JovenesenRed.es website (Spanish only).

According to a post found on Jothan Frake’s blog and  Dutch Telecom (subscription required), the ccTLD .me will now be run by a join operation between Afilias, Godaddy and Montenegro’s MeNet.

The .me domain name is the country-code for Montenegro, but has obvious commercial appeal. The country had issued a public invitation to bid, which according to Frakes received 3 bids : Neustar, Verisign Registry Services and the winning bidders.

Upon a review of the requirements for companies bidding, Domain Name News noticed that the agent will be required to have “a platform for auction of domain names.” It can be safely assumed that the Godaddy/Afilias/MeNet group will seek to auction some of the premium .me domains.

Afilias and Godaddy have partnered recently with their bid to run the .US registry. However, the contract was awarded to Neustar instead.

Please welcome North Korea (aka Korea, Democratic People’s Republic) (.KP), Montenegro (.ME), and Serbia (.RS) to the root zone.Delegation was approved at the recent Special ICANN Board of Director meeting on September 11.

My compliments to Kim Davies and David Conrad at IANA on a smooth process from board approval to root addition. It appears that the zones were added to the root, but the IANA whois does not yet list the administrative entities for these published yet.

.KP was delegated to “Korea Computer Center”.

.RS and .ME are going to be replacements for the former .YU namespace (formerly Yugoslavia - and YU left the ISO3166-1 list), with a 2-3 year responsible transition of that namespace as .YU is sunsetted. .RS is to be operated by the same adminstrator of the .YU ccTLD.

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Jothan Frakes is the newest addition to our list of contributors. Jothan has an extensive background working with both registrars and registries. Jothan is as “dialed in” to that scene as anybody I’ve met. He has a great grasp on the domain monetization space as well stemming from his current position with Oversee.net . We’d like to welcome Jothan and thank him for his additional insight to DomainNameNews.com and look forward to seeing more posts from him in the future.

Apparently the .PL registry has introduced a traffic tasting service allowing registrants to register a name for up to five days in order to see if there is any traffic on it. The registry writes:

Thanks to New Domain Name Tasting (DNT) service you can check profits and possibilities which an own domain gives as well to test the traffic before registration. Please, contact with the Registrar offering DNT service, choose the domain and let start with the test for 5 days! Please contact with the Registrar offering DNT service for more informations.

You will find a listing of the current .PL registrars here.

[via DomainNews]