Nominet consultation on .cymru/.wales TLDs

Under ICANN’s scheme to create new top level domains Nominet have applied to run two domains in cooperation with the Welsh Government: .wales and .cymru. Nominet are now consulting on how those domains should be operated. Janet will be responding to the consultation: we’ve just published an initial draft of that response and would welcome comments and suggestions by February 1st.

ICANN’s rules for new domains specify procedures that must be used to protect the interests of commercial rightsholders. Nominet have also included in the consultation measures to protect names used by the public sector from cyber-squatting or other forms of mis-representation. In particular the natural names of public bodies will be reserved. We suggest that generic terms for public bodies (‘cyngor/council’, ‘coleg/college’, etc.) should be included on this reserved list, as well as offering to reserve translations and trading names of individual bodies. Nominet see no need to allow registrants of second level domains to sell on third level domains within them; names matching existing UK second-level hierarchies (including .ac.wales/.ac.cymru) are reserved list to be dealt with outside the normal application process. As in our response to Nominet's direct.uk consultation, we would support both measures as reducing the risk of misleading parallel names or hierarchies.

We’ve also identified some guidance that it would be useful to provide for a bilingual domain: for example how to use domain names to help readers find their chosen language, and how to use the various Welsh characters that aren’t in the basic ASCII character set.