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.cv domains now on sale worldwide

Kevin Murphy, August 1, 2024, Domain Registries

Cabo Verde has become the latest nation to market its ccTLD globally based on its meaning in other languages.

The country’s .cv domain is now available via several registrars and recently formed registry entity OlaCV.

A CV is of course shorthand for “curriculum vitae”, what Americans call a résumé, in many countries. OlaCV reckons its addressable market is 3.5 billion people, according to its web site.

OlaCV appears to be a Delaware corporation formed in May last year, shortly before it was awarded the five-year registry contract by Cabo Verde regulator ARME.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any company information on its web site, but OlaCV appears to have its roots in Nigeria, with the ICANN-accredited registrar Go54 (formerly WhoGoHost).

WhoGoHost founder Ope Awoyemi, who has been doing domainer conferences recently, is named as president of the company in a press release today. IANA has the technical contact for .cv as Portuguese ccTLD operator DNS.pt.

Some of the international registrars named on the registry web site do not currently seem to support .cv on their storefronts, and prices vary substantially among those that do carry it.

While OlaCV say prices should be around $10 a year, the only registrar I could find selling in that range was NameSilo. Prices around $70 to $120 seem a lot more common right now.

The registry’s premium pricing strategy is a little different to the usual — domains of six characters and under have premium pricing, regardless of their semantic value.

Cabo Verde is an island nation in West Africa with a population of about half a million. A former colony of Portugal, Portuguese is the main official state language.

Registering .cv domains might become easier

Kevin Murphy, July 24, 2023, Domain Registries

The ccTLD for Cape Verde has a new technical manager and might be about to liberalize and standardize its registration process to make it more accessible to foreign registrants.

ARME, the local government regulator and .cv’s sponsor, said it has signed a five-year-contract with WhoGoHost, a Nigerian hosting company and ICANN-accredited registrar, to manage the TLD.

From the announcement, machine-translated from Portuguese, it appears that WhoGoHost will migrate .cv to a new registration system and manage the domain as part of the government’s digital globalization strategy.

CV of course stands for “curriculum vitae” in Anglophone countries, so there could be a market for .cv domains elsewhere in the world.

.cv domains currently cost the Cape Verdean Escudo equivalent of about $10 a year from the current registry, but registrars selling internationally typically charge over $150 due to it being a largely manual process.

The registry and registrars say that the TLD is currently limited to trademark owners. The registration process can take days to months. It’s believed to have only a few thousand domains under management.

The smart thing to do, to increase visibility and accessibility internationally, would be to dump the reg restrictions and switch to a standardized EPP back-end, enabling registrars to plug in relatively simply.

Cape Verde is a former Portuguese island colony off the coast of West Africa. It has a population of about half a million.