May 02
A Kurdish company has recently applied for the domain .KURD or .KUR generic Top Level Domain in order to represent the 35 million of Kurdish people who live around the world. This happened after ICANN started to take applications for new gTLDs, as informed in Domain Incite.
The vast majority of those 35 million Kurdish people live in Iran and Iraq, but there are also around 14 million Kurdish people living in Turkey.
The Kurdish society has been demanding the .KU domain during a long time, but this is a thing that was never expected to come true. Some other non-state organizations have received their own TLD as for instance the catalan community with the .CAT or the Palestinian one, which has a domain reserved by the ICANN, as well as an international telephone code, just in case they may need it in the future.
The .KURD / .KUR proposal is being driven by Aras Noori, a German citizen. Noori wrote to ICANN's CEO and president Rod Beckstrom in April 2010 applying for for either .KURD or .KUR intended to use by the the Kurdish community. Noori declared that they have not decided which gTLD to apply for yet.
Noori also wrote that "a domain extension for the Kurdish people has been a dream of many communities like ZKURD , KurdITgroup , KOSC and others. We, with support of many Kurdish groups and communities are committed in making a domain extension available for Kurd people."
You can find more info about the proposal at their official website: www.dotkurd.org.
Feb 12
An IDG report has revealed that China has enforced its measures to control the content hosted on all .CN domains. The report states that CNNIC has hired 600 temporary workers to check all dot CN websites to find erotic content and incorrect records.
What a difficult task for the 600 employes that will need to check about 14,000,000 .CN domains given that .CN is one of the most popular extensions these days.
But these news are not that surprising since CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) announced the "cleanup of .CN domains" some time ago. "While lax regulation in China has been partly blamed for malicious activity on .CN domains, the government's crackdown has focused on porn more than Web security," says the IDG report.
In fact, as said by Rebecca MacKinnon in an e-mail to IDG, "As with so many cleanups in China, there is a very legitimate crime-fighting and law enforcement side of this," but continued "But the flip side is that it also provides a very handy excuse to tighten controls on political and dissenting speech at the same time."
You can see the full report at Computer World.
Feb 11
Great news for the Spanish and Latin American domain investors. On February 7th new shiny times started for .CO (Colombia) ccTLD, which management has changed from their previows "owners", Universidad de los Andes, to .CO Internet SAS.
During the first hour with the new managers, more than 500 registrations occured under the .COM.CO ccTLD, the only available TLD at this moment, while we are waiting the launch of .CO (note .COM typo) in the following days. One of the key points of this success was, clearly, the decision of Godaddy to sell this name, which does at a price of 39.95 $.
This is for sure one ccTLD that will cause impact on the Spanish market, and the registrations are hot at the Spanish specific forums. Also a couple of aftermarket sales have been reported.
You will be able to follow all .CO and .COM.CO news at the new management website: www.cointernet.co.
