Today at 12:00 expired the deadline to present proposals to the Danish Telecommunication Agency for the management of the .DK Registry.

The great news is that besides the current operator, DK-Hostmaster, 2 big players of the domain industry have joined forces to present a competitive proposal to the Danish authorities. Tina Dam, Director of ICANN´s IDN programme and Danish national, is the leading figure in the DotDK adventure: with the help of Afilias, Registry operator for many TLDs which currently manages more than 13 million domain names, DotDK will work to modernize the Danish TLD and make it more responsive to the needs of the market (local as well as international) but also more worthy to represent in the international arena an high-technology nation such as Denmark.

For many years the .DK has extension has been managed by the Danish Internet Forum, and despite of a number of “bottlenecks” in the current Registry systems it has managed to grow to more than 800.000 registered domains. With a law on the .dk top-level domain from 2005 the Danish Government has however sought to achieve a higher level of control over the national TLD and ensure that it is administered efficiently and to the benefit of the Danish internet community.

In an interview to ComputerWorld.dk Tina talks extensively of her commitment to the development of .DK and of all her ideas and plans to make it more competitive and more in line with the needs and expectations of end-users and of the registrar community. The partnership with Afilias is an additional guarantee of a solid infrastructure and of the highest competence in running a domain Registry. Among the many objectives Tina would also like to bring an ICANN Meeting to Copenhagen very soon.

The Danish authorities have now until July 1st to analyze the proposals received and choose a winner: in case a new Registry operator is awarded the job, the transition should be completed in the first quarter of next year. Regardless of the final result it is however extremely positive that the Danish government has decided to put a number of clear requirements on the new .DK Registry, which will certainly benefit to a very high level the domain market in Denmark.