MARNet’s Rulebook created in 1995 is not compliant with the Constitution, announced the Constitutional Court and blocked the domain management service until the Ministry of Information Society establishes a proper domain service in compliance with the recently adopted law.

MARNet published the following announcement on its website on January 13, 2010:

“The University Computer Center of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje which performed the function of Macedonian domain name registrar for MARNet is no longer authorized to perform domain registration and other activities related to the registration of the domains under “.mk” – the top national Internet domain for Macedonia.”

According to IT.com.mk, the establishing of new domain name registrar can take up to two months, and those who want to register a domain, or change a server/domain name server, would have to wait untill then.

The Ministry of Information Society (MIS) alegedly confirmed the tweet of Urnebes Host. MARNet has created its Rulebook in 1995, but according to the Constitutional Court decision from December 22, 2010, MARNet is not a regulatory body that has the power to create such rulebooks, and is therefore banned from operating and managing .mk domains.

The MIS was supposed to take over operations from MARNet starting from January 1, 2011, and to liberalize the .mk domain, but the opposite happened. The decision of the Constitutional Court means that until the new coordinating body of MARNet starts working, Macedonian citizens would not be able to register .mk domains, nor would they be able to change any domain name servers or data in MARNet’s register. Anonymous MIS sources claimed that users would have to wait 1 or 2 months for the “new” MARNet to become operational, IT.com.mk reported.

According to the Constitutional Court decision, MARNet’s rulebook (PDF) is not compliant with the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia because it is not based on the Law for Founding of Macedonian Academic Research Network (Official Gazette of Republic of Macedonia #124/2010) which entered into force September 23, 2010.

Twitter hashtag: #marnetdown.

Source: IT.com.mk: „Сакате .мк домен? Ќе мора да почекате некој месец…“ January 13, 2011