Registration Policies .na

.NA-NIC Domain Registration Policies

Definition of terms:
• Name space: refers to any conceptual area in which names must be unique.
• Domain: an Internet domain.
• Entity: refers to a person, organization, company, corporation, or other group which attempts to organize under a common name and publish that name as Internet domain name. With regard to the registry .NA-NiC an entity is represented by the administrative contact as stated in the domain name application form.
• Applicant: an entity which has registered a domain or is in the progress of registering.
• Registry: a registry is an organization occupied with registration of domain names. Hereinafter designated as .NA-NiC.
• Registrar: a registrar is the entity which is authorized to enter and modify a registry's data, based on data supplied by the applicant and on the requirements of the latter.
• Repository: it contains the primary (master) data for the registry and is subsequently also designated as WHOIS data base – a more familiar term –, although WHOIS data bases may contain replicas of repositories.

Description of .NA-NiC: a Close Corporation specifically founded for the purpose of administering Internet domain names below the .NA national top level domain and.NA has been delegated to .NA-NiC by the
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority IANA.

Policies:
1. Types of registered domains: domain names may be registered for active usage (domain delegation) only. Domain reservations are not possible.

2. Name servers: for registered active domain names there must be an operational primary and at least one (and up to five) operational secondary Domain Name System (DNS) name servers. All registered name servers must have permanent IP connectivity to the Internet in order that they can be easily checked for operational status and database accuracy at any time by .NA-NiC. That means, that all name servers must respond to DNS and ICMP queries and allow DNS zone transfers to .NA-NiC. For details please see the rejection paragraph below.

3. Eligibility for registration, responsibility: any entity may register domain names, independent of the location of the entity. It is, however, recommended to register domain names below .NA top level domain only for bona fide Namibian entities which is reflected in the pricing structure. As far as .NA-NiC is concerned, the Administrative Contact in the application form is responsible for a domain and is therefore required to be a person and a member of the entity stated in the application as Organization Name.

4. Holder of domain name: the holder of a domain name is the entity stated as the Organization Name or, in case of natural persons, the person stated as administrative contact.

5. Equal rules: the .NA-NiC registry applies identical rules and policies to all applications made by entities.

6. Language: the language for communication with .NA-NiC is English.

7. Fees and invoices: according to the latest pricelist which is also available in PDF format. Invoices are sent in PDF format to the Technical Contact's email address as listed in the application form, or, on request, to the email address to a nominated Billing Contact. Payment is considered received, when NA-NiC has been provided by email with sufficient Proof of Payment in a form that NA-NiC may amend from time to time and has been able to reconcile such payment.

8. Processing order of requests: applications for new domain names are processed in chronological order of receipt by .NA-NiC (first-come, first-serve). More specific: e-mails are being processed in chronological order of arrival as they appear in the in-box of .NA-NiC. Applications by Fax messages or letters will not be processed. The entity seeking registration is fully responsible for their entries and is therefore required to supervise any records in the repository belonging to said entity. Applications for modifications (and deletions) of domain names are processed in a manner similar to that described above but exceptions to chronological order may be possible under certain circumstances and upon special request by applicants.

9. Acceptable character sets for e-mail messages: ASCII and ISO-8859-1 (ISO Latin 1) character sets are accepted and language-specific characters of the latter preserved for data in the repository. .NA-NiC may not be made liable for any processing errors when other character sets as the two stated above are being used by applicants.

10. Start of registration: normally within 10 working days of receipt of first valid, unmodified application form for a new domain name by .NA-NiC, provided the application is accompanied by the appropriate fees and and the Service Agreement duly signed by the Administrative Contact or an authorized representative. (A copy of the latest version is available in PDF format)

11. Termination of registration: domain names may be erased from the repository due to the following reasons:
• when the applicant requests deletion of his entry. The request needs to be sent to .NA-NiC in written form or by e-mail sent from the registered e-mail address of the Administrative Contact, to whom a confirmation will be sent by email. Allow normally not more than 30 days to process the request.
• when no or insufficient payment for annual maintenance is received. The entry in the repository corresponding to the unpaid fee will be erased without further notice after elapse of a period of 45 days, beginning on the day after which the first invoice for the unpaid fee has been due for payment and only be restored after settlement of all outstanding amounts and receipt of payment of a re-connection fee in the amount for annual maintenance.
• upon order by a court,
• as the result of Dispute Resolution in accordance with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' ("ICANN") Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy which is part of the Service Agreement.
• when the zone is not maintained according to the standards set for the rejections of applications within reasonable time of being notified.
Domain names which have been deleted will immediately become available for reuse by any party.

12. Responsibilities for domain: entities registering domain names are fully responsible for their right to said name. Submission of a domain registration constitutes warranty to .NA-NiC that entity has rights to use the submitted name, i.e. entities statements in the application form are required to be true and entity is required to have the right to use the Domain Name as requested in the application. Entity shall indemnify .NA-NiC from any litigation costs or damages resulting from entity's use of said name. .NA-NiC is hereby expressly exempted from any and all responsibility for the verification of rights to a name. Acceptance of an application and registration of a domain name constitutes no endorsement by .NA-NiC that applicant has a right to use the domain name in question under the laws of any state which might be applicable, e.g. with regard to names of natural or legal persons, trade names or trademarks.

13. Transfer of domain names: two possibilities exist for the transfer of domain names from one holder to another:
• The holder of a name deletes the data base entries of a certain name in the repository and a new applicant applies for the same name.
• The holder of a name submits a written and signed document to the registry authorizing another entity to apply for the deletion and new application for a specific domain name.

14. Solving conflicts: when a domain name has been registered by another entity or is in progress of registering, it is the responsibility of the entity seeking the registration to research the existing repository and pursue any litigation which may be necessary against the existing applicant, should said entity believe that existing applicant has no right to said domain. Entities and applicants acknowledge and agree that .NA-NiC cannot act as arbiter of disputes arising out of the registration of and use of domain names. All applicants agree to be bound by the current Domain Name Dispute Policy ("Uniform Dispute Policy") adopted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (``ICANN'') which is incorporated herein and made a part of the Service Agreement by reference. The current version of the Uniform Dispute Policy may be found at ICANN´s web site at http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp.htm. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with such policy. Registration of a pending application for a domain name will be suspended by .NA-NiC in case of a conflict with another pending application or an already registered active or inactive domain name until the conflicting applicants present a written and duly signed settlement of the conflict or a court decision resolving the dispute in favor of one of the conflicting parties.

15. Liability of .NA-NiC: The limitation of liability of .NA-NiC is limited to the amount paid to .NA-NiC, as per the Service Agreement.

16. Rules for domain names: domain names need to contain more than 2 and up to 24 alpha-numeric characters per name (a . . . z, 0 . . . 9). Non-acceptable names: see par. 21 below. Special character allowed: hyphen (-), but not as first and/or last character, and not as third and fourth character. Use lower case characters only because domain names are case insensitive.

17. Recommendations for domain names: domain names should preferably contain
• a length of more than five characters,
• a letter as first character,
• strong similarity to the full name of the entity seeking registration or to the abbreviation of the entity's name.

18. Return of pre-paid fees: when an entity loses its right to use a domain name, e. g because said entity has had no legitimate right to register a domain name, no refund of any pre-paid fees will be made.

19. Notifications: notifications are sent via e-mail by .NA-NiC to all contacts as listed in the application form when applications have been accepted, rejected or modified or as warning messages.

20. Rejects: reasons for rejecting domain name applications are:
• Incomplete entries in the application form
• Domain names containing less than 3 characters
• Domain names containing more than 24 characters
• Domain names containing special characters except the hyphen (-)
• Domain names containing hyphen as first or last character
• Domain names which are identical with an already registered domain name
• Domain names which are identical with a previously applied valid name
• Administrative contact is not a member or authorized agent of the entity stated as the organizational contact (not applicable to natural persons)
• Domain names of bad taste
• Misleading or deceptive domain names
• Domain names with offending character
• The Application Template is not sent to the proper email address
• The template is modified (for example through MIME)
• The Subject: line of the application does not spell out the purpose of the application or lacks the name of the proposed domain.
• The Primary and/or any Secondary Servers´ IP number does not correspond to its name.
• There is no Secondary Server.
• There are more then five Secondary Servers.
• The Primary and/or any of the Secondary Server does not respond authoritatively to DNS requests.
• Primary and/or secondary DNS server(s) do not respond properly and within reasonable periods of time (inter alia to DNS requests and/or ICMP ping).
• The DNS data on the Primary Server does not correspond with the data entered on the application.
• Any of the Secondary Servers does not update within reasonable time from the Primary Server, i.e. serial numbers in the SOA records differ.
• Attempts to send email to the Technical and/or Administrative Contact fail due to reasons outside .NA-NiC´s control.
• Outstanding payments.
• Testing the DNS delegation with the AFNIC tool results in errors (warnings are acceptable):
- The zone must be installed on all name servers (a minimum of two) that are specified on the application template.
- The name of the Primary Server given in the registration SOA corresponds to the first server listed in the application.
- The Zone Contact (RNAME) is legal and reachable by electronic mail through delivery to the first mail relay.
- The Serial Number of the zone is coherent on all servers.
- The Refresh Interval has a minimum of one hour.
- The Retry Interval is at least one hour.
- The Expiry Interval is at least one week and much larger than the Refresh Interval.
- The Time To Live (TTL) in the SOA specifies the TTL for negative responses (NXDOMAIN) and must be more than one hour and less than one day.
- A MX must exist for the zone with a legal mail relay name which must be (or point to) an IP address (A record). An alias (CNAME) shall be rejected in accordance with the RFCs.
- The email address must be reachable by electronic mail through delivery to the first mail relay and be read regularly.
- All name servers specified in the application must have permanent IP connectivity to the Internet.
- The servers must respond timeously to UDP and TCP requests on port 53 (DNS) and to ICMP echo packets from any system on the Internet.
- The servers mentioned in the application must be authoritative for the zone applied for.
- For each and any zone within ".NA", ".IN-ADDR.ARPA" and "." the server must obtain the proper corresponding list of name servers and must not be authoritative for such zones unless mentioned in such list.
- The addresses for the name servers mentioned in the application must be correct.
- Every server must obtain the correct address of every server of the zone, effect the checksums through UDP packets and generate its IP packets with a TTL of less then 64.
- No server mentioned in the application must be configured as a forwarder.
- The name of every server must be obtainable by reverse lookup through its IP address.
- On the Mail Relays (MX) the command VRFY must be implemented corresponding to RFC 1123, the return codes must be of the type "2xx" conforming to RFC1893.

21. Warnings: .NA-NiC may issue warnings
- in case of obvious name conflicts or when names are likely to conflict with another name, trade name, trade mark (TM), service mark (SM) etc. .NA-NiC, however, has no obligation to issue such warnings. After a warning has been issued, the corresponding application for a domain name is interrupted until until confirmation by the applicant in the form of a new application is received. .NA-NiC may, however, at its own discretion interrupt the registration until the entity seeking for registration submits within reasonable time to .NA-NiC a written confirmation of the holder of the conflicting name, trade name, trade mark (TM), service mark (SM) etc. that the application is valid and that holder agrees with the application. In such a case, a new application form needs to be submitted to the registry when the case is resolved for both parties.
- when the zone is not maintained according to the standards set for the rejections

22. Suspension of registration: when an entity submits grossly erroneous and/or misleading application forms repeatedly and/or in large quantities, or violates NA-NiC's communication policy below, the registry may suspend the registration process for such an entity until, in estimation of .NA-NiC, the registration process can be restored in an orderly manner.

23. WHOIS entry: .NA-NiC registers domain names in a repository which answers authoritatively for domain names in .NA. Some of this information may also be retrieved through a search engine run by .NA-NiC.

24. Communication with NA-NiC: .NA-NiC does NOT wish to communicate by fax, but through (plain 7 bit UNencoded ASCII, NO MIME or HTML) e-mail ONLY with regards to DNS related matters, or to with regards to financial matters. Under NO circumstances may you send emails to the private email addresses of NA-NiC members or contact any NA-NiC member or NA-NiC staff at their place of work, unless the issue pertains to bona fide, operational emergencies, the determination to be made by .NA-NiC.

25. Privacy: .NA-NiC reserves the right to make entries in the WHOIS data bases publicly available in any electronic and written form.

26. Applicable law, jurisdiction: this domain name policy shall be governed by and construed according to Namibian law.

This document is an integral part of the following documents: Service Agreement, associated documents: pricelist (fees for domain registration/maintenance) and the application template (the form for domain registration/modification), all issued by the registry .NA-NiC. All documents are subject to modification by .NA-NiC.

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