Gold Rush with New Top Level Domain .Co

My friend Cherry reminded me of the new release of New Top Level Domain (TLD)- .co on the 20th July. It’s the beginning of the .CO era! .CO is a new domain extension that offers a truly global recognizable and credible option for a Web address.

So what does .Co stand for?  It can be anything in this era, according to the Director of Marketing of CoInternet-  it can be “company”, “corporation,” or “commerce”. And of course in today’s world, that goes beyond “company”, to collaborate, content, and community.

Do you know that e.Co is sold for $81,000!!

The Launching of .Co

The standard process followed as the launching of other TLDs. The global launch of .CO is divided into three phases: Sunrise, Landrush, and General Availability.

Sunrise (April 26, 2010 – June 10, 2010): It is created for the pre-registration of domains in order to protect trademark holders and avoid abusive registrations. For example, if I own Google, I will have the right to apply for the Google.CO domain name corresponding to my company trademark before the registration of domain names opens to the general public. By using this phased approach, abuse can be prevented. The application fee is $240.00, and upon awarded, there will be an annual renewal fee of $39.90.

Landrush (already closed on the 16 July): This is a money making time for the .Co owner - CoInternet. Why is it called Landrush? My own simple explanation is everyone rushing for their own piece of land on internet. The Landrush phase is open to everyone and lets customers pay a premium to have a chance to secure high-commercial-value domains. The domains that get attention during the Landrush phase are normally short and memorable non-trademarked terms. For example, something like sushi.co would have high value to a sushi company. That domain has the potential to rank well in search engines and would be a fantastic addition to a company’s marketing and branding efforts.

General Availability (open to public starting 20th July): This is the final, broad-release period open to PUBLIC. You and me can go in now and grab whatever domain we want, as long as it is still available. Don’t be surprise that there are many good names still there! For example, I was playing around with the .Co domain registration just few minutes ago and found that LoseWeightExercise.Co, GoHoliday.Co etc are still available!! So if you want to grab a good name, please act now. You can register your own .Co domain  name at GoDaddy.

History (source: Domain Name Wire)
Lets dwell into the boring part- History. In fact, .Co is the country code domain for Colombia. For example, .my is for Malaysia, and .Sg is for Singapore. It was originally delegated to University of The Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. For many years, the University has run tight controls on the domain name. Registration was mostly limited to Colombian companies who could register their trade name or company name as an exact match at the third level, such as name.com.co. As a result, there are only about 28,000 .co domains registered.

About ten years ago, University of The Andes started to look at opening up registration of the domain name. Colombia’s Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications got involved, and went through a painstaking process of figuring out the best way to open up the domain. Arcelandia S.A. and domain registry Neustar formed a partnership to respond to Colombia’s RFP, and was awarded a contract to run the domain for 10 years.

Unlike the recent bungled re-launch of .cm, Colombia is clearly taking a different approach. “[Colombia] wanted to make sure this was done the right way,as it’s a real issue of national pride.”

As of now, the number of.Co web address registered is 154,576. And it is going Fast and Strong!!