The DomainFace Blog

In case you have been living under a rock for the last few months you might not have noticed that there’s a lot of buzz about the release of a new domain name extension. The one we’re talking about is .co and most registrars are already offering the opportunity to pre-register .co domain names.

The rather fortuitous benefactor of this country-code top-level domain designation is Colombia and as you’d expect with an extension like that, there’s a serious premium on the domains. Needless to say prices aint cheap with some registrars are charging $260+ as a pre-registration fee and as much as $40 per year for the domain registration! Despite this, the landrush shows no sign of slowing.

The release of a new domain extension is something that often takes several years to gain approval (and we thought the internet made everything lightening quick!), but in many cases, new domain extensions aren’t in fact new at all. Case in point the .co domain extension release, which is merely the opening of the doors to a property which has been around for a while.

The .co landrush can be likened to that of any of the big TLD’s with many squatters hoping to snap up generic terms, shorter strings and brand names then flip them for profit. As always it’s an aggressive affair and strictly first come first served, image the departure lounge on a low cost flight to Mexico and you’re about right. The scale of the release is so large that there are some rules to follow, well, one rule: you have until July 13th to pre-register with general availability opening up on July 20th.

Although .co has been around for a while, it’s not that old having only been introduced in 2008 as a Country Code for the South American country. But Colombia can’t claim to have the first general release country code extension to cause a stir, oh no, that gong goes to Polynesian Island Nation of Tuvalu. Any guesses on the extension? Yep, .tv and it belongs to the second smallest sovereign state in the world with a population of around 12,000 (looked that bit up on Wiki). And to think… some people thought it was created for Television and online video!

Although .co and .tv may be among the most well known of the released country codes, there are many more in general use. In fact since Twitter made Tinyurl.com virtually obsolete (just too long) various CC TLDs have been popping up to save your precious character space in your tweets, including:

is.gd
fb.me
bit.ly

And they’re not the only ones, other CC TLDs that are showing up for various sites
and services include:

.fm
.gl
.io
.cc
.cm

As you can see, there are plenty of CC TLD’s out there and many with a very attractive appearance; the thing is… what’s the next big release going to be? Answers in a comment please!