The lawsuit about co.no concerns whether it in real terms has been illegally transferred, and whether the current use of the domain is in breach of the domain name policy for .no. One of the important questions is whether the domain is used in a way that may cause confusion with official category domains, e.g. co.uk and co.nz.
Co.no was added to the list of reserved and forbidden domain names in July 2009 and may therefore not be transferred to another holder.
Background
The co.no domain is registered by the Norwegian company Elineweb AS, but is administered by the Dutch company CoDNS BV, that offer subdomains within co.no. Norid made inquiries about the domain after we received tips that co.no was intensively marketed as a way into the Norwegian domain market for foreign parties. The marketing also hinted that this had been cleared with Norid.
Court proceedings
We chose to ask Elineweb AS about the establishment of the service. They replied by bringing a lawsuit against Norid. A court-sponsored mediation was unsuccessful, and the legal proceedings tool place in Sør-Trøndelag district court on 24 and 25 May. The court's decision will be ready by the end of June.