|
'Some other country-code domains are open to registrations from people not even in
that country. Tonga (.to) is one such domain that's available to people worldwide.
Turkmenistan made its .tm domain available internationally, with particular appeal
to companies with trademarks ("tm"), but registrations have been put on hold after
the Turkmenistan government objected to some "obscene" domains being registered.
(Apparently, according to an article on this issue, those not-so-funloving Turkmen
(and Turkwomen?) found even "girls.tm" and "pizza.tm" to be "obscene"; I'm not really
sure why, unless they mean something radically different in their native language.)
More recently, Tuvalu's .tv domain was sold (actually leased for a 10-year period)
to an American company for millions of dollars, and they're now auctioning off the
most desirable names there rather than just letting anyone grab them cheaply like
other registrars generally have done. There are similar registries at .fm and .am,
belonging to the Federated States of Micronesia and Armenia respectively. Since
some of the country codes are two-letter words in English or other languages, this
has been taken advantage of by various people who have set up "redirection services"
under addresses like go.to, here.is, i.am, start.at, or for Spanish-speaking people,
pagina.de and espacio.de. The idea is to follow such an address with your site name:
http://go.to/mysite, which is set up to redirect to your real site address. Many
of these addresses are available free, but you're at the mercy of the service that
provides the redirect, which could go out of business or impose a really annoying
popup ad on visitors.' You forgot to mention Italy's .it domain, which could be
used for redirects or sites. For example, http://www.show.it would be a great
site.
|
|
|