October 13, 1999
Web posted at: 3:51 p.m. EDT (1951 GMT)

In this story: How it works When in Rome ... Dot com versus country domains RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Robin Lloyd
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- Dot com may be the Fifth Avenue of Internet addresses, but an estimated 2 million Web sites have set up shop at what amounts to East 101st Street -- a country-code domain name.

Country domain names such as .uk and .fr confer a regional identity or presence that appeals to companies or agencies, and some are cheaper to register than the standard-bearers of .com, .org and their brethren.

Others provide convenient tags, like Tonga's .to which one company has hijacked to provide its "move.to" service that redirects users from simple, easy-to-remember addresses to long, ugly ones with tildes, underscores and seventeen slashes.

The Internet has about 240 top-level domains, said Mike Roberts, president of the relatively new California-based agency that oversees Internet addressing. But some of the country domain names have just a few thousand registrants because no one quite knows what good they are.

"It'll be a while before country domain names do some of big time things we're into in the United States where the dot-com database is over 5 million," Roberts said.

The process for signing up for a country domain name is so decentralized now that no one knows exactly how many have been doled out. But each domain name adminstrator keeps count.

On the low end, some 3,000 sites are registered at the Philippines' .ph, 30,000 sites come with the .nz tag for New Zealand and 130,000 sites have .au for Australia addresses. On the higher end, the .de domain name for Germany has signed up 1 million sites.

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The Domain Game

How it works

A group within Roberts' Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers recently accredited five companies that provide or sell .com, .org and .net addresses or uniform resource locators -- URLs -- for about $35 a year.

As yet, there is no accreditation process for country code domains, some of which are overseen by entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations or even a single individual, Roberts said.

In the early days of the Internet, country domain names were handed out to friends, associates, anyone who asked for them.

Now, sophisticated bureaucracies, generally non-governmental, oversee the assignment and registration of country domains for such places as the United Kingdom and Germany.

However that is not the rule internationally, said Pinkard "Pinky" Brand, who oversees the division of Network Solutions that assists corporations with country domain name registration and is the world's largest seller of Internet addresses.

"In Third World countries, domain name registration may be run by some students," he said.

Brand said he recently asked the administrator for the Philippines' domain how he got the .ph designation.

"He said, 'I just simply wrote the domain administrators and asked them.' That would never happen today. It has become too political and economic," Brand said.

In the meantime, aspiring Netizens may visit a Web site maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority project within ICANN at www.iana.org to learn countries' codes, policies for registration and contact information.

The process can be cumbersome, with more than 100 country domains restricting registration to entities with a local address or business license and many requiring registration in local currency with fees ranging from $30 to $150 a year.

For that reason, Network Solutions' idNames Division offers help -- but at $500 a pop. For corporations seeking a targeted international Web presence, it might be worth it, and Network Solutions has seen an increase in requests for country domains in the past six months.

When in Rome ...

The increased demand for country domains could be a response to certain administrators who have relaxed registration requirements in the past six months -- including those for domain names in Canada, Australia, France and the Philippines.

Domain names for the United Kingdom, South Africa, New Zealand and Mexico are in the pool of unrestricted addresses. "These are countries where anyone can register whether you're a 14-year-old hacker or corporation," Brand said.

Germany requires a local address, but it can be your company's, your brother's or your dog's address, Brand said.

In Belarus, registrants must sign up with the state police. In Japan, a proposed domain name must be translated into Japanese ideographs to avoid conflicts with similar local names.

Dot com versus country domains

Brand agrees with Roberts that it will take some time before country domains gain popularity.

"Around the world, dot com is still the No. 1 brand-name on the Internet," Brand said. Although Network Solutions is the leader, it has about a dozen competitors that provide domain names.

Still, some country domains speak well to local populations, like Germany's .de and Britain's .uk.

"These are huge online markets where people are doing business and registering domain names," Brand said. "It's more likely those domain names will have stickiness in the public's eye."

Other up-and-coming country domains include Brazil's .br, Denmark's .dk and China's .cn.

A few country codes have become "vanity" or "boutique" domains, such as .cc for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands 1,000 miles northwest of Australia in the Indian Ocean.

Such addresses are marketed as alternatives to .com, Brand said.

Another example is .nu (for New Zealand's Niue Island in the South Pacific), which translates to "now" in Swedish and attracts many registrants from Sweden.

No one apparently has come up with a clever use for Uganda's .ug or Norway's .no.

But some investors did make a go of turning Tuvalu's .tv into a domain for networks and production companies like CNN, ABC and CBS.

"I remember getting a letter from an actor saying, 'I want you to register ABC.tv, CBS.tv, NBC.tv, and PBS.tv with my name on it,'" Brand said.

The venture appears to be unraveling as investors become nervous about the longevity of the domain name, he said.

For hot online and large, land-based businesses, it may be advisable to tack on as many country domains as possible after the company's name.

"I've seen clients succeed in registering in over 100 countries at a time," Brand said.

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