Country domains: a com­pre­hen­sive ccTLD list

Every internet address, or domain, has a domain ending, also known as a top-level domain. Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are used to indicate the site’s relation to a specific country or region (i.e. .uk for the United Kingdom or .eu for the European Union) and are therefore referred to as country code TLDs. ICANN (Internet Cor­po­ra­tion for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the company that regulates the al­lo­ca­tion of all ccTLDs. Meanwhile an NIC (Network In­for­ma­tion Center, also known as the Domain Name Registry) is the body re­spon­si­ble for the man­age­ment and reg­is­tra­tion of all regional domain ex­ten­sions in a country. In total there are now more than 200 ccTLDs, all of which can be found in the top-level domain list below.

Country-specific domain ex­ten­sions generally indicate the region or language that the website’s content is relevant for. Fur­ther­more, ccTLDs always include two letters of the Latin alphabet. The only ex­cep­tions to this rule are the countries with IDN-ccTLDs (in­ter­na­tion­al­ized country code top-level domains). In addition to the standard ccTLD, these countries have one or more variants of the same ccTLD in a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. An example of a country with several vari­a­tions of the same ccTLD is Sri Lanka; as well as the country code, .lk, Sri Lanka also uses the TLDs, .ලංකා and .இலங்கை, which refer to the country in Sinhalese and Tamil, re­spec­tive­ly.

Generic top-level domains provide the coun­ter­part to ccTLDs. These don’t have a regional domain extension, but rather refer to a specific theme (such as .com for com­mer­cial/business en­ter­prise or .org for an or­ga­ni­za­tion) and can include more than two letters. However, some ccTLDs are re­pur­posed and, like gTLDs, can be used to indicate par­tic­u­lar types of websites or the genre of content or products. Wordplay with certain country codes is also quite common. Examples of this include:

• FORA.tv: this video hosting platform and live streaming channel uses the Tuvaluan ccTLD to offer users all kinds of video uploading, editing, and streaming services. The .tv domain extension is par­tic­u­lar­ly popular in the area of tele­vi­sion, film, and video streaming sites (further examples include ustream.tv and green.tv).

• Last.fm: this is the web address of a UK-based music streaming service, which uses the county code of the Federated States of Mi­crone­sia, .fm. As the ab­bre­vi­a­tion also stands for ‘frequency mod­u­la­tion’, it shares a con­nec­tion with FM radio, and therefore enjoys pop­u­lar­i­ty among websites that are connected to radio shows, music, and podcasts (further examples include the internet radio platform di.fm and the music website, libre.fm).

• Can­IStream.It: Can­IStream.It is an online platform that provides links to on demand video services. By using the Italian ccTLD, the domain spells out exactly what service the website provides.

• Meet.me: this is the most expensive Mon­tene­grin domain ever sold (for $450,000). MeetMe is the name of a US-based social network that was able to express its brand name fully in the domain name with the help of Mon­tene­gro’s ccTLD.

The .tk domain ending is a special case when it comes to country domains. Over 30 million websites use this ccTLD, even though the island state of Tokelau, which of­fi­cial­ly presides over this domain extension, has less than 2 million in­hab­i­tants. The mass reg­is­tra­tion of .tk websites can be put down to the fact that in the past, it was com­plete­ly free of charge to secure an internet address with this ccTLD. Even now, website owners with a .tk TLD can run their sites without paying a dime for the first 12 months after reg­is­ter­ing.

The following domain ex­ten­sions list includes every country domain in existence. With this table, you can not only discover which country or area the domain ex­ten­sions belong to, but also whether the re­spec­tive ccTLD is available with DNSSEC. Websites can use DNSSEC internet standards in order to protect the domain name system from ma­nip­u­la­tion, which includes, for example, phishing websites, which can request sensitive data using fake webpages.

The column on the right indicates whether a web address reg­is­tered under the re­spec­tive ccTLD can also be allocated an in­ter­na­tion­al­ized domain name (IDN). As mentioned above, these in­ter­na­tion­al­ized domain names can use char­ac­ters from the Latin alphabet, including those with accents, in addition to char­ac­ters from other alphabets. These char­ac­ters are located in the second-level domain (i.e. the name of the website before the country code top-level domain). One example of this is the Canadian weather website, métro.ca, which includes an accented letter.

Top-level domains that have an IDN can be accessed using both Latin char­ac­ters as well as char­ac­ters from their re­spec­tive alphabet. However, this doesn’t mean that the cor­re­spond­ing top-level domain is also offered as an IDN ccTLD at the same time – as is the case with the afore­men­tioned example of Sri Lanka. A good example of this is Germany’s .de domain extension; although there is no al­ter­na­tive for the .de country code, German website owners can use many special char­ac­ters, including three vowels with umlauts (ä, ö, ü), the ‘ß’ character, as well as further char­ac­ters that contain accents (à, á, â, ã etc.). Since the German language is based on the Latin alphabet and can be optimally expressed with a ccTLD (unlike Sri Lanka), it’s also not necessary.