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SOUTHAFRICA.COM PETITION LAUNCHED
28th May, 2003
The South African Sunday Times has launched a petition in support of the South African government's attempt to recover the domain name SouthAfrica.com from the current registrant, Virtual Countries Inc.
Virtual Countries, led by US lawyer Greg Paley, has been the subject of some controversy in recent times as it controls the .com domain names for Belgium, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine. In addition to this portfolio it originally held the .com names for Korea, Switzerland and New Zealand. The latter domain was recently sold to the government of New Zealand for a reported $1million after that country's abortive attempt to challenge the registration under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy resulted in HM the Queen, the official Head of State, being found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking by the deciding panel.
The journalist behind his newspaper's petition, Elan Lohmann, describes the situation as a "travesty". He poured scorn on a recent assertion by Calvin Browne, a director of UniForum (overseer of the .co.za namespace) that offbeat and innovative addresses would be more successful than spending a large amount of money on southafrica.com. Browne had suggested that advertising "20PenceBeer.co.uk" on the London Tube (Underground/Metro System) would bring the tourists in droves. Lohmann is reported as saying that this would only achieve hits from "struggling backpackers and winos visiting the South African website in the hope of finding cheap lager".
More details at: http://www.demys.net/news/2003/05/28_za.htm
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