A cyclone has essentially
flattened the tiny Pacific island nation of Niue. Although only one of the island's 1200 inhabitants has died, the infrastructure is so battered that the government may simply
call it quits, ceding control to New Zealand. Although suffering from sharp population declines over the years, Niue had been one of the most technologically advanced microstates, being the first country to
install free Wi-Fi accessible to all of its residents and visitors. And they control the top-level domain
.nu - or do they? The recent natural disaster may highlight the fact that the story of the .nu domain is one of
economic and legal exploitation. And if Niue folds, can you run a website from a domain attributed to a
deleted country? A fascinating sidebar to this fascinating story. (Via
/.)
posted by PrinceValium
on Jan 12, 2004 -
6 comments
Who's a .pro? The new .pro
TLD will only be available to certified professionals
—at first just lawyers, doctors, and accountants—with subdomain strings (“.law.pro, .med.pro and .cpa.pro with more to come”) to identify the professions. [
more info at RegistryPro] Seems pretty clunky to me.
posted by kirkaracha
on May 11, 2002 -
25 comments
Last week, we got news of new.net, who decided to make a big splash in the alternative Top Level Domain (.com/.net/etc) game, with some moronic, un-coordinated with the other people scheme including some "patented new technology" that amounted to 'set new.net as the search path in your DNS setup'.
Well, apparently they've started a trend, as
now there's another player in the market...
posted by baylink
on Mar 8, 2001 -
1 comment
New.net lauched today, with their attempt to create their own TLD registrar that seems like a bastardization of DNS. Most people will need to
download a plugin, is there any chance this could be successful? Is ICANN doing anything to stop them or will they just die on their own?
posted by mathowie
on Mar 5, 2001 -
8 comments
Maybe ICANN really can't. There may be a revolt among all those Europeans who think that they own their parts of the Internet. (Who do they think they are, anyway? Don't they realize that they're just electronic colonies of the US?)
Actually, I'm with them; I think ICANN is getting just a little too full of itself.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Nov 25, 2000 -
2 comments
ICANN's Report on new Top Level Domains came out a few days ago, and I saw a list in a paper of some of the new proposed TLDs. These include: .shop, .travel, .news, .sex or .xxx, .web, .arts, .store. Two things worthy of discussion - what's the difference between .shop .store and .web (and where are other CONTENT based divisions such as .gay, .fan, .info, .zine, .kids) and secondly, why are these supposedly GLOBAL domain names all in full uncompressed English?
posted by barbelith
on Jul 21, 2000 -
17 comments