Just between .yu and .me…

by | Jan 14, 2008 | ICANN

The former Yugoslovia ccTLD has been designated for a 3 year sunset process, transitioning to .RS (Serbia) and .ME (Montenegro).   Following in the footsteps of the ccTLDs that have some generic appeal beyond simply that of the country (.TV, .MD, .FM/.AM, .CD, etc), there was some competition for the registry services with this recently introduced ccTLD.

According to the NIC, A bid was tendered, with three primary parties vying for this opportunity. 

According to a Dutch Telecom Paper (googled – non/pw version), Afilias and GoDaddy have partnered with Montenegro’s MeNet and are the top candidate for managing the registry of .me (Montenegro’s ccTLD).  They had been competing with  Neustar and a consortium of companiesand VeriSign’s Registry Services. The government will now negotiate the final terms of the contract with the lead candidate.

All strong candidates with very capable registry services.  It must have been a true challenge for the parties having to determine the most favorable bidder.

Three new TLDs in the Root: .KP, .ME, .RS

by | Sep 24, 2007 | ICANN, NewTLDs, Policy

Please welcome North Korea (aka Korea, Democratic People’s Republic) (.KP), Montenegro (.ME), and Serbia (.RS) to the root zone.

Delegation was approved at the recent Special ICANN Board of Director meeting on September 11.

My compliments to Kim Davies and David Conrad at IANA on a smooth process from board approval to root addition.

It appears that the zones were added to the root, but the IANA whois does not yet list the administrative entities for these published yet.

.KP was delegated to “Korea Computer Center”.

.RS and .ME are going to be replacements for the former .YU namespace (formerly Yugoslavia – and YU left the ISO3166-1 list), with a 2-3 year responsible transition of that namespace as .YU is sunsetted. .RS is to be operated by the same adminstrator of the .YU ccTLD.