Domain Name Registration in Lithuania

By Mr. Algimantas Guzevicius

Academic and Research Network in Lithuania (LITNET), which is an association of academic research and other non-profit organizations, is currently the State authority responsible for the management of the country code top level domain name (ccTLD) "lt".

Domain names shall be registered on "first come, first served" basis. Both, foreign and local, legal and natural entities can apply for registration of ccTLD in Lithuania. Foreign entities have the same rights for registration as local entities. A local presence is not required and the applicant is not obliged to have an already registered trademark or company/subsidiary in Lithuania.

The applicant is served with a domain name, which is easily associated with the organisation of the applicant. This can be done by registering a well-known or common abbreviation for the organisation, trademarks or the complete organisation name. Applicants are not limited on numbers of domain names.

As in many countries, the domain name may contain all Latin letters in the range a-z and numerals 0-9. The character "-" is used for the separation of the symbols (it can not be used at the beginning or the end of the name). Minimal length of the domain name is three letters, except if two-letter domain name is registered as a trademark. Maximal length of a domain name is 63 symbols.

The anatomy of a domain name is following: the top-level domain (TLD), the second level second-level domain (SLD), the subdomain, etc. The top-level domain is usually made by using the country code "lt". The second-level domain is composed according to the name of organization or the name of Internet WWW. The second-level domain names are made from the names of the service station, protocol or the names of Internet service or lower names of that hierarchy. The domain name is composed strictly according that hierarchy: from the name of the lowest domain name level till the highest separated by periods, called "dots", for example name.office.lt, where "lt" is a top-level domain, "office" is the second-level domain, "name" is the subdomain. The use of "generic names" (such as AC, CO, GO, RE, COM, EDU, GOV, NET, ORG, etc.) under the "lt" domain is phased out and no new registrations will be done in these categories.

At the moment there is no special legislation dealing with the domain name registration in Lithuania. There are certain rules that are applicable to registered ccTLD's in Lithuania, namely, the...