Time to shine: .pw registry announces sunrise phase
The .PW Registry invites brand holders worldwide to secure their trademarks during the Sunrise phase, which incorporates unique features to ensure an effective and seamless way to protect the rights of trademark owners, says Sandeep Ramchandani.
Millions of individuals and businesses are turning to the Internet to establish a professional online presence. The .pw top-level domain (TLD) is focused on providing this audience with firstchoice names in an open, quality namespace known as the Professional Web.
The .PW Registry will adopt policies and practices to create an abuse-free namespace that is safe and secure. .pw is planned to be the new generic TLD that provides users with a global Internet destination. It is also the country code TLD of the Republic of Palau.
The .pw TLD is being introduced to the global market as a strategic project of the Directi Group. It will target high volume domain registrations, with more than 50 registrars from 20 countries already accredited.
The Directi Group, which operates several domain name-focused companies including LogicBoxes, ResellerClub, BigRock, Skenzo, Media.net and Radix Registry, announced the launch of the .PW Registry in October 2012, at the ICANN meeting in Toronto.
On average, 70 percent of domain name availability searches are returned as ‘unavailable’. As a virgin name space, the .PW Registry has an abundance of short and memorable names available for registration. .pw has been reasonably priced to be one of the most affordable domain name extensions in the industry. Any business that was on the fence about coming online because of the cost, now has a stronger incentive to create a web presence.
.PW Registry has an unrestricted registration process and supports IDN registrations in multiple languages across 11 scripts. It already has a strong global distribution network comprising almost 60 domain registrars from 20 diff erent countries in just over a month since launch. Many .pw registrations are expected from developed and emerging Internet markets such as Brazil, Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Ukraine and Mexico. Global adoption is also expected due to the ease of registration and aff ordability of the TLD.
.pw will be on offer from some of the most prominent registrars in the industry: MarkMonitor, EuroDNS, Key-Systems, Com Laude, Hexonet, IP Mirror, 101Domain, Safenames, DomainMonster, United Domains, MailClub, Marcaria, EPAG, Lexsynergy, Name. com, CSC, Instra and RU-Center. A full list of accredited registrars is available on the registry website ( http://registry.pw/registrar-list.php).
The Sunrise
The .PW Registry launch phase starts with an extended Sunrise period of 68 days (December 3, 2012 to February 8, 2013) to allow brand holders suffi cient time to protect their marks in the .pw namespace. Any brand with a trademark registered before December 1, 2012, can apply during this period to protect their marks in the new .pw namespace. Furthermore, Sunrise registrations will carry a minimum registration period of two years.
"Any business that was on the fence about coming online because of the cost now has a stronger incentive to create a web presence."
The Sunrise period has been tailor-made for trademark holders to avoid costly and timeconsuming domain resolution and recovery processes. Brand owners cannot only protect but also extend their brand identity with .pw names.
The Sunrise process has a list of features to make it the most eff ective and seamless way to safeguard the rights of brand owners in the .pw namespace.
• Domain name strings that represent a common misspelling, an abbreviation or include the addition of keywords as a prefi x or suffi x of a validated trademark can be submitted (eg, ‘amazonbooks. pw’ is valid for the ‘Amazon’ trademark, ‘nkie.pw’ is valid for the trademark ‘Nike’).
• The application fee will be charged only once per trademark, irrespective of the number of domains associated with that TM.
• Translations of trademarks into English internationalised domain names—(Arabic, Latin, Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Th ai, Lao).
• Document-free validation.
• Pre-validation process to avoid rejected applications.
TM.Biz, which integrated the Trademark Fact Check service to enable the validation of trademarks for new gTLDs, is the trademark validation agent for the .PW Registry. Trademark Fact Check debuted for the .xxx Sunrise, where it pre-validated thousands of trademarks by searching more than 65 online trademark databases and applying the validation criteria defi ned by the .xxx registry. It will be a ‘trademark-friendly’ process, with key features such as pre-validation and modifi cations post-submission at no cost. In the event of multiple valid applications for a single domain name, an auction process will determine the owner of the domain name.
CentralNic, a UK-based registry service provider with 16 years of industry experience in providing registry services, strategic consultancy and distribution channels for new gTLDs, ccTLDs and second-level domain (SLD) extensions, is the technical service provider for the .PW Registry.
The registry has also partnered with WIPO and the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) to provide trademark holders the industry-preferred option to recover domains which violate marks in the .pw namespace. The recovery process involves thecost and process in case mark holders identify domains that infringe their marks.
Further stages
The Sunrise phase will be followed by a Landrush phase, which will be open for a month (February 18, 2013 to March 18, 2013), for corporations, trademarks, small businesses, professionals, domainers and others to secure high value, generic and short domain names that are no longer available in other major domain extensions.
The General Availability phase (from March 25, 2013), the last phase of the .pw launch, will allow domain names that are not otherwise reserved or restricted by the registry to be registered by the general public on a ‘fi rst come, fi rst served’ basis. The registry expects to create a bigger and wider global distribution network with more registrar partners signing up every week. With the new gTLDs expected to be available by the end of 2013 at the earliest, .pw is expected to satiate the growing demand for short and aff ordable domain names.
Consult your respective brand advisers to understand how you can leverage the key features of the .PW Registry Sunrise to secure your trademarks. For more details visit the registry website: http://registry.pw/launch_schedule.php
