Recent Posts
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Freenom adds .gq to free African ccTLD roster
Kevin Murphy,
October 2, 2014, 15:43:59 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Freenom has struck a deal with registry for the once-dormant ccTLD for Equatorial Guinea to offer .gq domain names for free worldwide.
The ccTLD is the latest from Africa to buy into the company’s free domains model, after .cf (Central African Republic), .ml (Mali) and .ga (Gabon).
The local registry for Equatorial Guinea is telecom provider GETESA
Netherlands-based Freenom is best-known for .tk, which with over 26 million names is the second-largest TLD after .com, despite ostensibly representing the 1,500 inhabitants of tiny Pacific island Tokelau.
Funded to the tune of $3 million last December, the company makes its money by monetizing the residual traffic from expired and deleted domains in the zones it manages, as well as add-on services.
.gq is currently in sunrise and expects to go live with general availability December 1.
A recent Anti-Phishing Working Group report found that Freenom’s ccTLDs are much more likely to host phishing attacks, relative to their size.
Equatorial Guinea is a small country, with just over 650,000 citizens. While ostensibly oil-rich, most of its inhabitants suffer from truly shocking poverty, human rights and infant mortality rates.
This affects the GQ magazine. Suppose there is a magazine and they have this email, economist @ magazine,gq, you see the problem. 2 letter naming problem if a cctld wants to internationalise.
typo: …,,,, and allow free-sold suffix use.
also: Then suppose GQ changes to the full name Gentlemen’s Quarterly, all those GQ domains not matching the full name are they needed: gq.com, gqindia.in, gqmagazine.in, gqthailand.com, gq.com.au? BT (British Telecom) could have a problem if .bt (Bhutan) is free-sold and internationalised.