Registration Agreement .mc

Since 1998, the management of the assignment of domain names for the Principality of Monaco area has been entrusted by the Government of Monaco to the Internet Department of the " Direction des T鬩communications de Monaco ". This department, under the authority of the Councillor for Public Works and Social Affairs, is in charge of the safe operation of the DNS (Domain Name System). Apart from its role as registration office for " .mc ", the Direction des T鬩communications de Monaco is in charge of regulating the management of the schedule of frequencies and the relationship between specialized foreign administrations and public or private operators. Moreover, its mission is to " secure the control of the licence granted to the telecommunication public operator and the licence for the operation of the teledistribution network by cable for the Principality and to exercise the administrative and technical guardianship over all the physical persons or corporal entities authorized to offer telecommunication services ".

Considering that the management of domain names comes under public management responsibility, this task was allocated to the regulator of the Monaco telecommunications to guarantee a right to each applicant according to established rules.

Direction des T鬩communications de Monaco
Service Internet - NIC MONACO
23, avenue Albert II - 98 000 Monaco
Telephone : +377 93 15 88 00 - Fax : +377 97 98 56 57
e-mail : nic@nic.mc

The " .mc " assignment of domain names for the Monaco area must be subjected to an application to the Internet department of the Direction des T鬩communications de Monaco. This department, named NIC MONACO for Network Internet Center, is in charge of managing the naming of this area, the operation of the DNS (Domain Name System) and the international coordination.

The Internet department of the Direction des T鬩communications accepts only applications for Monegasque domain names from legal commercial entities or public or private organizations. Applications for persons or informal groups are not accepted. Domain names may represent the name of a company, an organization or their logo, a trade mark or an association.

The composition of a domain name must observe a few simple rules (see RFC952 , RFC1033 ) :

The length of the domain names, unless justified otherwise, must include a minimum of three characters.
The only characters authorized in the composition of domain names are :
from " a " to " z "
from " 0 " to " 9 "
" - " hyphens
All the others are forbidden, namely the characters " " (space) and " / ".
The character " . " is used exclusively to divide the different levels of the sub-domains.

It is advised to group together entities of a same organization in the hierarchy of this organization. Names may be reserved by NIC MONACO, for instance generic names.

Moreover, the application must observe Internet rules, the main ones being :

The DNS basic specifications are formed by RFC's : RFC1032 (Domain Administrators Guide) , RFC1033 (Domain Administrators Operation Guide) , RFC1034 (Domain Names - Concept and Facilities) , RFC1035 (Domain Names - Implementations and Specifications) .
A domain name is assigned to one entity only. Before any application, it is advisable to check the list of names to see whether the requested name is available.
The application for the creation or modification of a domain name is done using standard forms .
The assigned name is a user, belonging to the applicant organization.

Disputes about the use of a domain name are dealt with between the parties concerned. NIC MONACO's mission is the registration. It carries out no search for the anteriority of the name. It is up to the applicant to check that the requested name does not harm prior rights concerning namely the code of intellectual property and the law concerning trade marks.

The NIC MONACO DNS operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This server is duplicated several times onto secondary servers, the RIPE being one of them.