SA government 1, Virtual Countries 0

Johannesburg, 21 Jun 2001

The government`s Department of Communications says it has won the first round of its battle for the Southafrica.com domain name, and its war to protect the names of sovereign nations.

The department says a New York court this week ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over the dispute and would not prevent the government from turning to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) for arbitration.

"The court`s argument was that there was no justification for a New York court to stop a sovereign country from going to an international body with the matter," says departmental spokesman Robert Nkuna.

Virtual Countries, the American company that has owned and operated SouthAfrica.com as a commercial property for five years, last year filed suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to prevent WIPO proceedings.

At the time, Virtual Countries said it was concerned that previous WIPO decisions showed it was likely to lose the domain in arbitration.

It may have even more reason to be concerned now. In March this year the department filed a submission with WIPO arguing that both the official and common names of countries should be protected against domain registration, and that such domains previously registered should revert to the countries in question.

"No second level domain name can be registered in any gTLD [generic top level domain] which is the same as the official common name of a sovereign nation, except by the sovereign nation itself, or upon the authority of that nation, and any sovereign nation has the right to have any existing such registrations cancelled and/or transferred to the sovereign," reads the proposed policy.

The proposal also argues that country-specific domain names were registered at a time when developing nations did not have access to the Internet and did not recognise the importance of domain names.

Nkuna says the WIPO submission was not meant only to prepare the ground for the Southafrica.com arbitration, but to establish a broader policy that would favour the many countries without current access to such domain names.

"It is a matter of principle," he says.

The department says its efforts will not impact companies with other kinds of geographic names, such as Amazon.com or Kalahari.net, as some previously feared. The policy proposal "would have no affect on the domain name registration of any geographical terms other than the very few country names," it states in the submission.

Virtual Countries could not immediately be reached for comment and it is not known if the court decision will be appealed.