First Geographic NewgTLD, .RUHR, Now Delegated

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First Geographic NewgTLD, .RUHR, Now Delegated

	By Dan York Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and on staff of Internet Society
	December 12, 2013 Views: 10,745 Add Comment

Each week ICANN has been delegating more new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs) and it’s been somewhat entertaining to watch the list of delegated strings to see what new TLDs will enter the domain name space starting sometime in early 2014 when they become generally available for people to register new domains under. I haven’t written about the new strings as I did in the past largely because this is now getting rather routine and those who really care can just watch that list of designated strings.

However, I do think it is interesting to note that this week brought the delegation of the first newgTLD for a geographic region. The previous 34 newgTLDs have all been more generic words (as you can see on the list). Given the large number of geographic newgTLDs and the controversy around some of them, I wondered who might be first to be delegated. It turned out to be .RUHR, for the Ruhr area of Germany. Operated by Regiodot, they plan to make domains in .RUHR generally available by March 2014.

Congratulations to the team there for achieving this milestone. On a personal level, given the work I do it’s also great to see that like all these newgTLDs, .RUHR is launching with support for both DNSSEC and IPv6. Excellent news!

By Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and on staff of Internet Society

Dan is the Director, Online Content, for the Internet Society but opinions posted on CircleID are his own. View more of Dan’s writing and audio here.

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