FOLLOWING THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN ICANN AND EUROPEAN WINE PRODUCERS ORGANIZATIONS AT THE END OF JUNE, BRANDS ON CLEARINGHOUSE TRADEMARKS HAVE FIRST CLAIM ON DONUTS TO REGISTER “.WINE” AND “.VIN” DOMINIONS

We have come to the final act of the lengthy arguments following the launch of the new domains ".wine" and ".vin".
The official launch was a few days ago, on November 5, but today is the most important phase. After months of negotiations between ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers), the American authority that manages the system of generic top-level domain names, that delegated the management of the two domains to www.donuts.co, the largest registrar of top-level domains in the world, and European wine producers organizations (Arev - Assembly of European Viticulture and EFOW - European Federation of Origin Wines, heading the list), they came to an agreement at the end of June that protected names and producers, from appropriating names, fraudulent use of the reputation of certain products, cybersquatting, and so on.

For all those brands that in the past few months have registered with Trademark Clearinghouse-the system developed by ICANN that allows trademark owners to send their data to a single database-before and during the launch of new generic Top-Level domains, today begins the period of pre-emption (operated by an outside company to "Donuts" to ensure maximum transparency), which will end on January 16, 2016. After this date, however, all protections will also end and the basic principle of the management of Internet domain names, that of "first come first served" will prevail...