Western Samoa - Was: seven years mix

[Ray]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Pope Jeremy wrote:

> > Western Samoa started marketing their ccTLD as
> > "Dot-WS means Web Site!" a few years ago.
>
> If this isn't a silly joke, I didn't know that a state
> could profit from the use of its top level domain.

Every country on earth has a two-letter ISO country code.  For the sake
of convenience, these ISO country codes were also reserved as top-level
domains for each country.  Each country is allowed to do whatever it
damn-well pleases with its ccTLD.  The UK and others have broken theirs
down categorically (co.uk for commercial sites, ac.uk for academic sites,
etc.)  Places like Norway and Singapore use theirs just like the global
TLDs .com, .net, etc, as in foobar.sg or monkeypants.no.  Some countries
that have little to no use for their ccTLD have sold off the rights
to resell domains to a corporation, or have set up their own internal
agency to sell domains under their ccTLD.  Probably the best-known ones
are .to (Tonga - used in all those come.to/foo and click.to/blah URLs),
.nu (Niue - quite popular in Sweden because "Nu" means "New" in Swedish),
and everyone's favourite, .cx (Christmas Islands).

> How does that work? Does the U.K. get cash-money every
> time someone registers www.foo.uk.com with verisign?

I'm assuming you mean foo.co.uk.  You don't register .uk domains with
Verisign.  You register them with Nominet (www.nic.uk) or a reseller, and
Nominet makes the money from it (if any - they are a not-for-profit org.)

If I remember correctly, Western Samoa wasn't really using its .ws
ccTLD, and sold the rights off the the guys at www.website.ws when
they came asking for it.

-- Ray

i will have you know that Iron Maiden is a very good band.
i will destroy you.      -- b00