Addresses Tap New Domains

They come from almost unpronounceable places that many Americans have never heard of--Moldova, Niue, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu. But that hasn’t stopped the Internet domain names for these and other countries from becoming some of the trendiest addresses on the Internet.

Due to the coincidental double meanings of some countries’ two-letter Internet abbreviations, and the nearly depleted reservoir of premium .com, .net and .org addresses, more Americans are turning to these so-called country code top-level domains to get the Internet addresses they want.

Many Internet users are familiar with country codes such as .us for the United States, .jp for Japan and .uk for the United Kingdom.

But in addition to these are such commercially precious gems as .fm for the Federated States of Micronesia, .tv for Tuvalu, .pr for Puerto Rico and even .bs for the Bahamas.

With 242 existing country codes, ranging from .ac for Ascension Island to .zw for Zimbabwe, there are ample possibilities for those who are creative and cunning.

Jon Strohmeyer, a plastic surgeon in Naples, Fla., used the country code for the former Russian province of Moldova to register facelift.md two years ago.

“It’s kind of neat to have the ‘md’ at the end,” Strohmeyer said.

He didn’t know then and still has no idea where the country is located. But when he heard from a client that .md was an option, he was happy to pay the $250 registration fee to change his Web address from facelift-md.com.

“I didn’t like the dash,” Strohmeyer said of the old domain he registered three years ago after discovering facelift.com was spoken for.

Andrew Auderieth, 25, registered amazing.ly four months ago. “Most fun stuff was taken in the [.com] area, so I went to the .ly,” said Auderieth, who is using the address to build a personal Web site with his girlfriend.

The Philadelphia owner of a Web hosting business had no idea .ly was Libya’s country code. “It just sounded kind of cool,” he said.

Like many people who are using country codes, Auderieth was unaware they were available until he saw them listed as an alternative on Register.com, one of several domain name registries that offer them.

“They’re sort of like vanity license plates,” said Erica Lin, Register.com’s marketing director. “You can get pretty creative.”

Casinos in Atlantic City, N.J., are using Ascension Island’s .ac domain. Country clubs, community colleges and radio stations owned by Clear Channel Communications are turning to .cc--the code for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

Andy Banta, a Nevada software engineer, registered fooli.sh, puni.sh and peevi.sh so he could post newsgroup messages with oddball domain names.

Though .sh is handy for completing words in English, its intended use was as the country code for St. Helena, a 47-square-mile British island in the South Atlantic with 5,500 residents.

The country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs, were created in the 1980s by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a group based in Marina del Rey that for many years was responsible for administering the Internet’s addressing system. Those duties have since been taken over by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, based in Los Angeles.

Eager to profit from the .com crunch, American companies began negotiating with countries to use the codes about three years ago. The momentum has picked up significantly in the last few months.

In a widely publicized deal signed last April, the Polynesian island of Tuvalu partnered with Pasadena-based DotTV to market and register .tv e-mail and Web addresses worldwide. The 10-square-mile country with 11,000 residents will receive $4 million a year from DotTV, which is registering tens of thousands of domains each month, according to its marketing director, Rob Kostich.

Global Domains International, which last March partnered with the government of Western Samoa to market .ws as an acronym for Web site, has registered 65,000 domains. The revenue-sharing agreement provides the small South Pacific country with a portion of each $35 yearly registration fee GDI takes in.

Though ICANN prohibits countries from selling their domains, dozens of other poor and virtually unknown countries have struck licensing deals in exchange for free computers, Internet service and cell phones, as well as cash.

“A lot of these countries don’t have the infrastructure or capabilities to function as a registry, and this is a money-making opportunity,” said John Albright, director of intellectual property services for Network Solutions, the Herndon, Va., company that maintains the international master domain name registry.

Country-code domains work just like the generic domain names .com, .net and .org. They are frequently less expensive than generic domains, which cost $35 a year. But some are significantly more expensive. DotTV domains, for example, range from $50 to $1 million depending on the name.

.NU Domains, in Medfield, Mass., charges $45 to register .nu names for two years. The company is marketing the country code for the 259-square-mile Pacific island of Niue.

A company spokesman contends that “there is cachet with being NU instead of COMmon,” but it is unlikely .nu and other country codes will replace the market dominance and prestige of .com, which now accounts for about 80% of the 25 million generic domains that have been registered.

ICANN also moved to alleviate the .com overcrowding by adding seven top-level domains in November--.biz, .info, .name, .pro, .museum, .aero and .coop.

Though companies that offer country-code domains are profiting from the shortage of premium domains, there will come a time when they, too, run out of desirable words.

At least that was Mahlon Smith’s experience. A system administrator for an Internet service provider in Ashland, Ore., he tried to register nanu-na.nu, but it was already taken.

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Susan Carpenter is an editor in The Times’ Southern California Living section.