New cooling off phase to prevent unintentional domain loss

Effective 3 December 2013, the managing organization and central registry operator of the .DE top level domain, DENIC, will launch a dedicated cooling-off service (called Redemption Grace Period – RGP) which shall apply for all second-level domain names in the .DE name space. This procedure shall protect registrants against an unintentional loss of their domain(s), as a result of accidental deletion.

Under the RGP scheme, .DE domain names shall no longer be irretrievably lost, following deletion, but instead initially enter a subsequent 30-day cooling-off phase, during which they may solely be re-registered on behalf of their former registrant(s).

RGP cooling-off provisions shall allow former registrants to redeem registration of the subject domain names, by having recourse to the related Restore service, through a registrar. Only if no redemption is requested, during the 30-day RGP phase, the relevant domain names shall become available for registration by any interested party again. At the time being, similar regulations are applied by other top level domain registries already.

Registrars redeeming a deleted .DE domain name for the original registrant will have to pay a Restore fee and may pass on the related costings.

Deleted .DE domain names placed in cooling off, from RGP implementation, will be earmarked by a redemption period status in the DENIC lookup services (whois) accessible at www.denic.de.

As a consequence of the above measures, the current DENIC .DE domain guidelines shall be superseded by new, amended ones from the date of RGP launch, i.e. 3 December 2013, which shall then be permanently published at http://www.denic.de/en/domains/general-information/domain-guidelines.html.