Domain Name Blog

Without a doubt the most valuable extension that exist on the internet is the .COM having more than 70 million domain names registered. Many companies have not been able to register their domain name under the extension and have got to settle with registering the combination of words or look in other extensions in order to have presence on the Internet. Soon these companies will have a second chance to register their domain under a new extension which can turn out to be even more interesting than the .COM and .CO.UK - the new extension .CO.

This second chance is available since Colombia, which uses the extension .COM.CO, has approved the creation of the extension .CO which should be available for registration in approximately a year. Now, a company that was not able to register mycompany.COM now will be able to register mycompany.CO. This new domain name extension .CO is very interesting since it will not only allow the use of characters like á, é, í, ó, ú or ñ but, eventually the new entity that will manage the extension, could implement the use of IDNs for other languages like Portuguese, French or German, which will transform domains .CO in a more powerful and universal extension. Read more about .CO domain name IDNs here.

The problem is that the registration will be on the basis of the system “First Come, First Served”, which in most cases means that many important domains will be lost for being on second place. Although there is a solution to this problem!!!, on the “Guidelines for the transition of management of the CCTLD .CO” states: “The registrants, on the date when this policy is approved, that have a domain .CO on the 3^rd level (for example mycompany.com.co), will have priority to obtain the same domain under the second level”. This means that if you are really interested in obtaining a domain under .CO, you can hurry up and register that domain under .COM.CO (if it is available) and this will allow to assure automatically that the same domain under the extension .CO will be yours. It is important to consider that the new domains are registered before this new policies are approved and that in Colombia it takes longer to have domains assigned because of the documents required.

by Juan Enrique Sánchez S. President NameAction Domains Latin America.

Followed by a comment from 3appraisal team: Isn’t this a great bit of news? Do you remember the year of 2000, when Andes University, the official governing body of .CO domain name, wanted to launch the 2nd level registrations, it was prohibited by an order of the Court. It would mean big problems for .COM and .CO.UK domain names - in fact, if .CO would be allowed, these top level domains would never be the same again. But who cares if ICANN or Verisign are anxious about letting new guys into their playground? In fact Columbia can do what they want. The only problem being, if IANA will refuse to add .CO to their DNS Root zone, we will not be able to open sites ending with .CO. Let’s hope that this time Columbia succeeds.

We would love to hear your comments. How do you think this would affect the online community?

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