At present the only rivals to the domination of .com in the domain name business has come from various domains assigned to countries that have taken on a meaning beyond their original intention of identifying a country. For example, you can register a name in .tv if you want people to assume you are a television company or .tm to indicate some sort of trademark claim. But these are in fact the domains assigned to, the Tuvalu atolls in the Pacific and Turkmenistan. These two-letter country-code top- level domains (ccTLD) were handed out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as part of its federal government contract over the last ten years. The director of IANA Jon Postel, who was largely responsible for their allocation, died unexpectedly in October. There are around 240 ccTLDs in all at the moment. Some are used widely, such as .uk in the UK and .jp in Japan, but the .us domain for the US is only really being used by local and federal government, not because of any restrictions, but because .com quickly gained cachet as the domain name to have in the US. More recently, companies and users all over the world have chosen .com as their domain of choice too. Because of this, it comes as no surprise to find that Network Solutions Inc, which currently holds the US government contract to exclusively control the registry and is the sole registrar for .com, as well as .net and .org top-level domains (TLDs), should be quite adamant in its belief that these country-specific domains should be only permitted to register names to users who either reside or do business in those countries. NSI senior VP Don Telage believes that such ccTLD operators are running registries tat are functionally equivalent to every other type of registry and it’s a big, big issue. The issue, as Telage sees it, is that the companies marketing their ccTLDs should be subject to the same constraint as NSI. From March 31, NSI will be required by the government to open up its .com, .net and .org registry to five registrars to start with and then unlimited competition by October 1, as part of an amendment to its cooperative agreement signed on October 7 with the Department of Commerce. Telage believes that the ccTLDs should all be under the control of the relevant local government, the administrators should be based in those countries and legal battles over trademarks, and should be subject to local laws. Any standards that are imposed should be uniformly applied, says Telage. But Bill Semich, who runs the .tu registry through a contract with the of Niue, says that would be like putting the genie back in the bottle, meaning that these ccTLDs have already been co- opted for commercial use and it would be impossible to go back. And anyway, he says, most of them are not run by the national governments He points to other mainstream ccTLDs, such as .uk that are used occasionally for nefarious purposes – a company might want to claim that it is a UK-based company, which has advantages in some industries. He also points to the lack of control exercised by NSI over .net and .org, which have had their exclusive original users – network service providers and non- profit organizations – largely fall by the wayside and now anybody can register names in those domains. The .nu registry launched a shared registration system earlier this year and now has registries in Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, Canada and in parts of Asia. These companies pay a licensing fee to the .nu registry, but no per-domain name fee, which would be the case if they were just resellers. Semich also points out that all profits from the annual $25 .nu registrations, after costs, go to the Internet Users Society in Niue for development of internet access there. Semich says there are currently about 25,000 names registered in .nu. In Swedish the two letters mean ‘now’, and in French they mean ‘naked,’ both of which present the opportunity for a lot of interesting domains.
