On September 10, 2019, the Legal and Technical Secretariat issued Resolution No. 45/2019 which approved the registration of domain names directly on the Top Level Domain (“.ar”). In the same line, Disposition No. 201/2019 established the rules, schedules and procedures under which the opening process of the registration must be carried out.
The opening process, which is the period during which the new applications and domain name registrations can be made under the ".ar" zone, is divided in two stages: the sunrise registration and the interest registration.
Sunrise Period
The sunrise period is reserved to those domain names that are registered before NIC Argentina in any of the “.ar” extensions. Therefore, preference registration is reserved for domains registered in the following areas: ".com.ar", ".net.ar", ".org.ar", ".int.ar", and ".tur.ar” that have been registered before December 1st, 2015 and have remained valid until 15 days before the start of the preference period. However, registrations in the “.gob.ar” and “.mil.ar” zones are excluded.
The sunrise period runs from September 11, 2019 until November 9, 2019.
Interest Registration
The interest registration begins once the sunrise registration period finalizes, and runs from November 25, 2019 until January 23, 2020.
The interest registration grants a time-window to those who may want to register domains under the “.ar” zone. Thus, during that period, NIC Argentina will receive all applications under the “.ar” zone. Once completed, Nic-Argentina will verify if there are any requests for identical domain names. If there were, the possibility to register the domains will be granted through a lottery system. The date on which the applications were made shall not affect the order of priority to register the domain name. So, those who request a domain at the beginning or at end of the interest period will participate in this process on equal terms. Similarly, once the period of interest registration is over, if there is only one application for the domain name, that user shall be granted the opportunity to register it.
If the domain names are not requested by any user during the interest period, they will remain vacant for the general availability period.
General Availability
As of February 23, 2020, that is, once the opening process is over, all domain names that are available may be registered directly in the “.ar” zone, applying the general registration regulations.
This insight is a brief comment on legal news in Argentina; it does not purport to be an exhaustive analysis or to provide legal advice.