The fact that every country has the right to determine its own guidelines for assigning its domain leads to considerable variation. In France, for example, anyone wishing to register their domain under .fr first needs to have their residency or company headquarters located within France. And until 2009, Germany required all .de TLDs to be composed of at least three characters, of which at least one had to be a letter. Many smaller or poorer countries have capitalized on these domain assignment rules by strategically marketing their ccTLDs:
- .to: the ccTLD of the island nation of Tonga has been managed by the domain registry, Tonic, since 1997. The assignment process takes places automatically, regardless of the applicant’s actual residency. And the fact that Tonic doesn’t carry out a whois search means that .to domain owners remain completely anonymous, making it a very popular domain for file sharing as well as other controversial video services.
- .tv: the microstate of Tuvala was able to cash in on $50,000,000 when it sold its ccTLD to the company DotTV, which then marketed its purchase as a television domain. The money went to financing IT infrastructure as well as paying the admission fee for the UN.
- .ag: the top-level domain, .ag, is actually for the independent state of Antigua and Barbuda. It’s also often used by many large German businesses whose legal entities are organized as Aktiongesellschaften, or joint-stock companies.
- .me: Montenegro’s country top-level domain has experienced a massive flood of registrations since first becoming available in 2008. .me domains, which often take on constructs like love.me, are often auctioned off upon registration. A notable example was seen in 2011 when the domain meet.me was sold for $450,000.
In addition to the over 200 ccTLDs, there’s also a host of internationalized TLDs, which contain umlauts, diacritic characters, or letters from non-Latin alphabets. These IDN top-level domains have been around since 2010 and allow virtually all Unicode characters, although individual registries are still able to determine which characters are allowed. A complete list of top-level domains for countries as well as a collection of internationalized TLDs can be found on Wikipedia.