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Japan gets two new geo TLD projects

Kevin Murphy, June 16, 2011, 11:30:02 (UTC), Domain Registries

BusinessRalliart, a Japanese technology company, has announced that it plans to apply for two geographic top-level domains covering the prefecture of Okinawa.
According to a few local news reports, the two proposed TLDs are .okinawa and .ryukyu, covering the names of the region and the islands themselves.
It’s not entirely clear from the articles whether the company will also apply for the Japanese-script equivalents.
What’s particularly interesting is the fact that, according to a translation provided by UrbanBrain, the investors in the project are reportedly a car rental firm and a restaurant chain.
I’m speculating, but it seems likely that these investors will get some premium domain name real estate under these TLDs as part of the deal.
I’m expecting to see quite a few of these kinds of relationships emerging in the first round of new TLD applications – getting an investor and an anchor tenant on board in one deal makes good sense for a limited community or geographic TLD.

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Comments (6)

  1. John Smith says:

    It would seem to me that the best domain name real estate for both TLDs would soon be reserved for the US-military.

  2. […] news follows the announcement last week of a commercial bidder for the .okinawa and .ryukyu geo-TLDs, to represent the Japanese region of […]

  3. […] news follows the announcement last week of a commercial bidder for the .okinawa and .ryukyu geo-TLDs, to represent the Japanese region of […]

  4. […] domain registrar, Future Spirits is a hosting company, and BusinessRalliart is a technology company already linked to bids for .okinawa and […]

  5. […] registrar, Future Spirits is a hosting company, and BusinessRalliart is a technology company already linked to bids for .okinawa and […]

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