Slovak ccTLD, dot .SK
Czech technocrat, Ondřej Caletka, alleges that the Slovak ccTLD, dot .SK, was stolen in 1999.
After the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993 into the Czech Republic (now Czechia) and Slovakia, both countries were given new ccTLDs: .CZ and .SK respectively.
While the Czech Republic’s ccTLD management history seems normal and boring, that wasn’t the same with .SK.
According to Ondřej Caletka, the Slovak government delegated the operation of .SK to SANET, a Slovak academic network operator.
In turn, SANET sub-delegated the operation of .SK to an informal group named EUnet Slovakia, based at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Comenius University in Bratislava.
Says Caletka:
In 1995, the people operating the TLD at Comenius University started the takeover attempt by renaming their private company Softwarehouse, s. r. o. (s. r. o. stands for limited liability company) to EUnet Slovakia s. r. o., which was similar to the name of the informal group taking care of the registry. In addition, they relocated the company to a small leased office on the premises of Comenius University so they would share the postal address. Then, in 1999, they asked ICANN to do a minor adjustment of the delegation — delete “Comenius University” and add “s. r. o.” after “EUnet Slovakia.”
That entity convinced ICANN to make changes:
“ICANN made the change in good faith as a simple minor adjustment to refine the address. In reality, this was the point where the private company had overtaken the .SK domain operation from the informal non-profit group. Nine days after this change, on 19th August 1999, the company was sold to another, Euroweb International USA, located in the United States of America. The fraudulent takeover was successful.”
Currently, .SK is operated by a private operator that sold it to another company; under pressure from the Slovak government, that contract is under negotiation, and CentralNIC is looking to add it to .PW and .LA, two national ccTLDs that are contracted by their respective governments of Palau and Laos.
Ondřej Caletka is concerned that the Slovak ccTLD, .SK, will thus never return to the community it serves, the Slovak people.
For that, there is a petition to return .SK to the Slovaks, from the web site nasadomena.sk.
For the full article by Ondřej Caletka, titled “The story of stolen Slovak national top level domain .SK” click here.
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