Domain Registration Challenges

A key objective of the European Union is to create a unified, barrier-free market for it's members.

Domains however seem to provide a few hurdles for entry into a market that are more difficult to overcome.

It's not always easy to just buy up domains. In France for example, to get a .fr domain name, you need to be a French registered company.

This makes it more difficult that it should be to buy domains across the whole EU for each market in which your (EU member state registered) company operates.

A Swedish friend of mine has just told me about a newsflash about a company challenging a country registrar to the EU for discrimination and unfair competition practices.

"Swedish company Gents wanted to register a Finnish domain but were denied since the rules in Finland say that a company must be local to get a .fi TLD. They then registered through a third party but had that registration removed by the Finnish registrar saying it was against Finnish law.

So Gents filed a complaint, saying it is discrimination of Swedish citizens and companies…

...Gents says it forms barriers of entry and unfair competition advantages since “domains are so important for search engines like Google"

I tend to agree. Creating restrictions on domains is a restriction on free trade.

I'm interested to see whether this challenge is successful or not. Good luck to Gents!

Here's the original article in Swedish