BloggingLine - Blogging Tips & Resources

The domain name business is a $2 billion one and is expected to reach $4 billion by 2010. The domain number has reached over 150 million, of which over half is .com or .net domains.

This inevitably results in more difficulties to assign a good domain name for a new site. CCTLDs (country-code top-level domains) are then chosen for the alternative.

But soon, the problem recurs for CCTLD. ICANN had to release new TLDs based on continent (.eu, .asia), culture (.cat, .sco), or segment (.travel, .jobs). Then there started a new wave of cross-bordering domain registration.

Some countries started to see it as a good business. Tuvalu, an island with 14,000 inhabitants, sells its .tv domain internationally, for ‘television’ domain; and an ex Soviet-country Moldova offers its .md domain for medical doctor communities.

Domain pun started coloring the Internet culture. Laos offers its .la domain for Los Angeles citizen, while North Ireland businessmen prefers to register .co.ni subdomain from Nicaragua rather than using .uk domain.

The pun flows inevitably. GTLDs with complete name (.info, .name) are licensed for fun and pun, such as Useless.info, Invalid.name, etc. And also CCTLD, like .it of Italy, .to of Tonga, etc. Improve.it, Go.to, Who.is.

Another idea came to use CCTLD as part of the word. Cr.yp.to, Del.icio.us, Blo.gs. Eu.ro, Wristwat.ch, , etc. And also name. Ma.tt for Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress), Jes.us, or my own domain Kun.co.ro. Now they have a name: domain hacking. Steve.jobs? No, I haven’t checked it.

Criticisms have been cried against the practice of domain hacking. It breaks the mapping of Internet sites to political or geographical position. True, but it has been so since the rise of .com.

And how to start a domain hacking? A service like Xona.com could help finding ideas for domain hacks, albeit sometimes inaccurate. But Wikipedia is surely a good point to start. Start on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCTLD. A list of CCTLD could be found, with a sign to indicate whether the domain could be registered internationally.

A click on our chosen CCTLD will show the terms & conditions to register a domain under the CCTLD. We can see whether we’re lucky enough to be able to register a domain on second level (directly under the CCTLD).

We must also re-check whether the domain registration requires local presence. The address of each registrar is also linked on Wikipedia. If we’re unlucky, just wait.

Sometimes the policy is revised. It is not necessary to plan annexing a country just to gain a domain name.

Image credit: GettyImages

Kuncoro Wastuwibowo is a worker of telecommunications technology and business, and a lover of science and music. He lives in Bandung, West Java, currently works for Telkom, Indonesia’s largest telecommunications provider.