Thread: A question about geo domains.

I'm thinking about buying some domains with a town name in it (eg. kanpur.in or natara.in). What's it's the registrar policy on it, especially when the local authorities claim such domain name? Is it still possible to lose it even if I develop it into a local service?

Registrar never have any policy on such matter they are govern by registry policy. According to us these names are not against the registration policy unless otherwise you do something against the law on that. Local authorities cannot claim these names now.

Originally Posted by Mitsu

Registrar never have any policy on such matter they are govern by registry policy. According to us these names are not against the registration policy unless otherwise you do something against the law on that. Local authorities cannot claim these names now.

Yes, I meant the Registry (INRegistry) policy. Thank you for clarification.

I own several and eventually, within the next 3-5 years, will make them into city guides.

If they come along and take them away, there's little to nothing a domain owner can do about it, but it would be a colossal financial error on their end. The reason .in sees so much foreign investment is because foreign investors feel safe participating in the system. If they take away even one domain in the name of some capricious 'public interest', that feeling of security would recede and so would the investment dollars.

As we've seen recently with .cn and .ly, ccTLD registries have significant control over their own destiny. They can make them freehold, ala .de, .co.uk or they can regulate them, ala .cn and .us (the latter having languished with significant potential that has gone unrealized, thus far).

The general movement for all ccTLDs is towards liberalization, ala what we've seen with the ccTLD registries in Scandinavia, most of whom formerly had a residency nexus policy, but have since liberalized towards a freehold policy.

The Indian registry has policies regarding content (for example, pornography), but none (that I know of) regarding ownership of keywords. Should this change- for example, lets say the city of Agra decides they want to stop using the .nic.in and wants Agra.org.in... And let say I'm unwilling to sell it, and they decide to retroactively change the rules and take it away from me, they would effectively be introducing a significant dynamic of instability to the .in namespace, which would be a cause for grave concern amongst all .in owners.

The Indian namespace has a significant representation (some would argue, over-representation) of foreign interest, however, pursuant to the very rules laid out by the registry when they liberalized the namespace, all keywords, including geos, have been freehold since that time. If they wanted, they could've reserved these names prior to liberalization, but they chose to make them available to anyone. As such, people now own them.

If this changes, then it changes, but they would be tripping over dollars to pick up pennies. They would seize a minuscule number of domains in the name of 'public interest' in exchange for making their entire ccTLD much less appealing to investors and more like Lybia, as opposed to that of the UK. The pipeline of dollars would slow, quickly, and all it would take is one single domainer telling the world that his .in domain was retroactively taken away without having violated any rules that were in place when he bought it.

Owning a ccTLD of a country of which you are not a permanent resident has risks, but if India is to remain on the cutting edge of the global economy, they would be wise to keep their doamain system freehold like .com, like .org, like .co.uk, like .de rather than like .cn or .ly.