Notification to the Parties

CONCERNING:

CITES domain names

1. The CITES Management Authority of The Netherlands has informed the Secretariat that it has registered ‘cites.nl’ as the domain name of a website. It also plans to use the same name as an easy-to-remember email address for any interested party (e.g. permits@cites.nl, questions@cites.nl, etc.).

2. The Secretariat considers this to be an excellent initiative and recommends to the Parties to register domain names on the same model, i.e. www.cites.xx, where ‘xx’ represents the ISO two-letter country code. This standardization should make it easy for interested parties to find information on CITES at the national level.

3. The CITES Management Authority of The Netherlands has pointed out that while it might now still be relatively easy to claim a national CITES domain name, this could change in the near future, as ‘cyber-squatters’ register domain names using the names of existing organizations in the hope of later selling them to the organizations concerned.

4. More information about domain names can be found on the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) website (http://www.iana.com). IANA is the body that controls country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) registration. The IANA ccTLD Database gives the contact details in each country of the agency that provides a ccTLD registration service.