Latest geo-gTLD goes to sunrise
After a protracted limited registration process, the latest geographic gTLD is due to shortly go live.
.zuerich, representing the canton and city of Zürich in Switzerland, went into sunrise yesterday. Registrations come with residency restrictions.
The sunrise runs the whole month of September, to be followed by a month-long limited registration period. General availability comes November 22.
In DNS terms, Zürich has the misfortune of having a diacritic in its name. While it could have applied for an internationalized domain name variant, it chose to deumlautize the string with the addition of a “E” instead.
The gTLD has been in the root for almost seven years, believe it or not, but it only now getting around to its formal launch phases.
ICANN records show its first restricted registration phase started in 2017.
Zone files show 25 live domains, but a web search reveals only one active non-registry web site — an addiction treatment center.
.zuerich is government-run, using CentralNic for registry services.
The canton has around 1.5 million inhabitants, around 440,000 of whom live in the city.
CentralNic wins .london back-end deal from Nominet
CentralNic today announced that it’s taking over back-end registry operations for .london.
It’s taking over from Nominet, which has run the technical aspects of the registry since 2016 when MMX dumped its registry business.
The contracted registry is London & Partners, the marketing arm of the London mayor’s office.
CentralNic is based in London, whereas Nominet, which runs .uk and .wales, is based in nearby Oxford. Original registry MMX was based in the British Virgin Islands.
.london currently has about 51,000 domains under management, down from a 2018 peak of about 86,000.
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