1.
The Gambia
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The Gambia, officially the Republic of The Gambia, is a country in West Africa that is entirely surrounded by Senegal except for its coastline on the Atlantic Ocean at its western end. It is the smallest country in mainland Africa, the Gambia is situated on either side of the Gambia River, the nations namesake, which flows through the centre of The Gambia and empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Its area is 10,689 square kilometres with a population of 1,882,450 at the April 2013 census, Banjul is the Gambian capital, and the largest cities are Serekunda and Brikama. Later, on 25 May 1765, The Gambia was made a part of the British Empire when the government formally assumed control, in 1965, The Gambia gained independence under the leadership of Dawda Jawara, who ruled until Yahya Jammeh seized power in a bloodless 1994 coup. Adama Barrow became The Gambias third president in January 2017, after defeating Jammeh in December 2016 elections, Jammeh initially refused to accept the results, which triggered a constitutional crisis and military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States, resulting in his exile. The Gambias economy is dominated by farming, fishing, and especially tourism, in 2008, about a third of the population lived below the international poverty line of US$1.25 per day. The name Gambia is derived from the Mandinka term Kambra/Kambaa, meaning Gambia river, upon independence as a Commonwealth realm, the country used the name The Gambia. Following the proclamation of a republic in 1970, the name of the country became Republic of The Gambia. The administration of Yahya Jammeh changed the name to Islamic Republic of The Gambia in December 2015. On 29 January 2017 the new President Adama Barrow said the name will go back to Republic of The Gambia. Arab traders provided the first written accounts of the Gambia area in the ninth and tenth centuries, during the tenth century, Muslim merchants and scholars established communities in several West African commercial centres. Both groups established trans-Saharan trade routes, leading to an export trade in slaves, gold and ivory. At the beginning of the 14th century, most of what is today called Gambia was part of the Mali Empire, the Portuguese reached this area by sea in the mid-15th century, and began to dominate overseas trade. In 1588, the claimant to the Portuguese throne, António, Prior of Crato, letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I confirmed the grant. In 1618, King James I of England granted a charter to an English company for trade with the Gambia, between 1651 and 1661, some parts of the Gambia were under the rule of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, and were bought by Prince Jacob Kettler. The British Empire occupied the Gambia when an expedition led by Augustus Keppel landed there following the Capture of Senegal in 1758. The 1783 First Treaty of Versailles gave Great Britain possession of the Gambia River and this was finally ceded to the United Kingdom in 1856. As many as three million slaves may have taken from this general region during the three centuries that the transatlantic slave trade operated
2.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2
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They are the most widely used of the country codes published by ISO, and are used most prominently for the Internets country code top-level domains. They were first included as part of the ISO3166 standard in its first edition in 1974, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are used in different environments and are also part of other standards. In some cases they are not perfectly implemented, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are used in the following standards, Starting in 1985, ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes have been used in the Domain Name System as country code top-level domains. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority currently assigns the ccTLDs mostly following the alpha-2 codes, but with a few exceptions. For example, the United Kingdom, whose code is GB, uses. uk instead of. gb as its ccTLD. The European Commission generally uses ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes with two exceptions, EL is used to represent Greece, and UK is used to represent the United Kingdom. This notwithstanding, the Official Journal of the European Communities specified that GR and GB be used to represent Greece, for VAT administration purposes, the European Commission uses EL and GB for Greece and the United Kingdom respectively. IETF language tags are also derived from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes. The full list of ISO 3166-1 codes assigned to countries and territories are usable as region subtags, also, the exceptionally reserved alpha-2 codes defined in ISO 3166-1 are also usable as region subtags for language tags. Some other region grouping subtags are derived from other standards, under the newer stability policies, old assigned codes that have been withdrawn from ISO 3166-1 should no longer be reassigned to another country or territory. The following is a colour-coded decoding table of all ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, click on the cell to see the definition of each code. The following alpha-2 codes can be user-assigned, AA, QM to QZ, XA to XZ, for example, UN/LOCODE assigns XZ to represent installations in international waters. The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository assigns QO to represent Outlying Oceania, before the adoption of the macroregion code EU by ISO, CLDR also used QU to represent the European Union. The code XK is being used by the European Commission, the IMF, the code XA is being used by Switzerland, as a country code for the Canary Islands, although IC is already reserved for that purpose. The code XN is being used by the World Intellectual Property Organization as an indicator for the Nordic Patent Institute, the codes XE, XS and XW are used by WhatsApp to represent the flags of England, Scotland and Wales as Emoji. Reserved code elements are codes which have become obsolete, or are required in order to enable a user application of the standard. The reserved alpha-2 codes can be divided into the four categories, exceptional reservations, transitional reservations, indeterminate reservations. These codes may be used only during a period of at least five years while new code elements that may have replaced them are taken into use
3.
.af
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. af is the Internet country code top-level domain for Afghanistan. It is administered by AFGNIC, a service of the UNDP, registration is made directly at the second level, or on the third level beneath various categorized subdomains at the second level. Third-level domains have restrictions based on which second-level domain they are registered under, registration on second level is unrestricted, but more expensive. All fees are higher for international registrants, the domain was delegated to an Abdul Razeeq in 1997, this only a year after Taliban fighters had captured Kabul and founded the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. NetNames of London initially maintained the following an agreement with the IANA. IANA. af whois information AFGNIC official site AfghanServer. af registrant
4.
.ag
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. ag is the Internet country code top-level domain for Antigua and Barbuda. Registrations can be made at the second level directly beneath. ag, there are no restrictions on who can register. Aktiengesellschaft, abbreviated AG, is a German term that refers to a corporation that is limited by shares, i. e. owned by shareholders, the term is used in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It also has a use for other domain hacks for English words that end in -ag. The Heritage Foundation uses. ag for URL shortening, a German court ruled in July 2004 in second instance that a. ag domain may only be registered by an Aktiengesellschaft and more precisely by an AG that has the same name as the domain. That means that a company with shareholders in Germany with the name X AG, list of. AG Registrars IANA. ag whois information
5.
.ar
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. ar is the Internet country code top-level domain for Argentina. It is administered by NIC Argentina, registering a. AR domain directly is not allowed, only the 8 second-level domains below are open to everyone, although a local presence in Argentina is required. As of January 2017 there are currently 9 second-level domains, the. gob. ar domain was also approved for government entities. NIC Argentina Resolution N° 904/2008 about tur. ar domains IANA. ar whois information
6.
.au
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. au is the Internet country code top-level domain for Australia. It was first created on 5 March 1986, Domain name policy is managed by. au Domain Administration, with the registry operated by AusRegistry. The domain name was allocated by Jon Postel, operator of IANA to Kevin Robert Elz of Melbourne University in 1986. After an approximately five-year process in the 1990s, the Internet industry created a body called. au Domain Administration to operate the domain. It obtained assent from ICANN in 2001, and commenced operating a new regime for domain registration on 1 July 2002. Since this new regime, any registration has to be ordered via a registrar, oversight of. au is by. au Domain Administration. It is an organisation whose membership is derived from Internet organisations, industry members. The organisation operates with the endorsement of the Australian Government and with the authority of ICANN. Policy for. au is devised by policy development panels and these panels are convened by auDA and combine public input with industry representation to derive policy. The day-to-day operation of the. au registry technical facility is tendered out by auDA, the current operator is AusRegistry who has performed this role since the initial tender in 2002. AusRegistry does not sell domain registration services direct to the consumer, rather consumers who wish to register a domain must do so via a domain name registrar, after the industrys liberalisation in 2002, there is an active competitive market in registrars with a variety of prices and services. In 2008 auDA changed its policy and allowed changes in ownership of. au domains. AuDA introduced the ISS in October 2013 as a mandatory requirement, discount Domain Name services, Cheaper Domains and Information Brokers, part of the Total Internet Group, are the first three auDA accredited registrars to achieve ISS compliance. The naming rules for. au require registrations under second-level categories that describe a type of entity. com. au and this follows a similar allocation policy to that formerly used in other countries such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Registrations are currently permitted below a second-level domain, such as yourname. com. au, in April 2016, auDA announced it would introduce registrations directly at the second level, such as yourname. au. Direct registrations are due to be implemented in 2017, registering a domain in the. au namespace requires registrants to have either an exact match or a “close and substantial connection” to their desired domain name. Registration of a. au domain is completed through a reseller, known as a registrar and these domains are managed by the. au Community Domains Trust on behalf of auDA. CGDNs use the state or territorys common abbreviation as the level of the domain
7.
.ax
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. ax is the Internet country code top-level domain of the Åland Islands, introduced in 2006. Previously, most Åland websites were under the. aland. fi subdomain, on February 17,2006, the Finnish parliament approved a modification of the laws regulating Finnish domain names to include the. ax top-level domain. On March 17,2006, Finnish president Tarja Halonen signed the bill into law, the government of Åland began accepting registrations immediately following the changing of the law. On June 9,2006, ICANN approved delegating the. ax top-level domain to the government of Åland, the. ax domain was added to the root zone on June 21,2006, and became active on August 15,2006. The code ax itself comes from the ISO3166 standard, and was assigned to Åland in 2004
8.
.ba
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. ba is the Internet country code top-level domain for Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is administered by the University Teleinformation Center, Registration procedure for BA domain names is slightly more complicated than it is for registering international domains, and it is defined by laws and regulations of BiH institutions. For more information, please see Regulations regarding the registration of the BA domain, while international domains can be bought by anyone without any additional requests and documents. BA domain can be bought by only those who meet all requirements listed in Regulations. First condition for domain registration is that name is free. Own second-level domains are permitted, which for-profit companies use, IANA. ba whois information NIC. BA BIHnet Sayber SARnet Centar Registracijadomena. ba - Registration procedure Registracijadomena. ba - Regulations for. BA domains registration
9.
.be
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. be is the Internet country code top-level domain for Belgium. The domain became active in 1989 and was administrated by Pierre Verbaeten of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in 2000, the control of the TLD was transferred to DNS Belgium. As of June 2013 there are 1,392,477 registered domains and it was announced in November 2005 that the initial registration of domains would be free until the beginning of 2006, though with some limits on the number any individual was allowed to register. This was remarkably popular, with some 17,000 registrations coming in on the first day of the promotion, domain names are registered directly at second level. Some of Belgians main academic institutions, such as the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, use third-level names under ac. be, any. be registration has to be ordered via a registered agent. The domain has also been in use as a logo for the government since 2003. Only recognized UN member states are eligible for a two-letter domain extension, in October 2008, the Flemish government expressed its intention to obtain a three-letter domain code for Flanders, like. vla. vln or. fla. In 2014. vlaanderen and. brussels were added, also administered by DNSBelgium, on the website YouTube, a shortener for YouTube videos is youtu. be, for example www. youtube. com/watch. v= becomes youtu. be/. Google’s chrome experiment, for the 40th anniversary of the Rubiks cube, Chrome cube lab, features many domain hacks like Image Cube, IANA. be whois information List of. be registered agents
10.
.bf
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. bf is the Internet country code top-level domain for Burkina Faso. The registry site, is the ARCE site, a document purporting to be an official registration form can be found at the URL http, //www. artel. bf/IMG/File/domaine-bf. pdf
11.
.bg
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The domain name. bg is the country code top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet for Bulgaria. It is currently operated by Register. BG, the price of domain registration is 30 euro per year. Until mid-2006, the price was 50 USD for one-time registration plus 50 USD per year, from August 25,2008, Register. BG simplified the procedures, allowing the registration of domain names in the. bg zone without providing documented grounds for the name. Eventual disputes are to be solved via the newly established Arbitration committee, since September 18,2006, Register. bg proposes new, third-level domains in the a. bg, b. bg, etc. subdomains, lower cost, with less restrictions and no dispute resolution. They are targeted mainly at private individuals, the domain has been enabled with Domain Name System Security Extensions since October 2007. On September 5,2009, Register. bg started accepting second- and third-level domain names in Cyrillic with letters found in the Bulgarian language only. бг IANA. bg whois information Register. bg
12.
.bi
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. bi is the Internet country code top-level domain for Burundi. It is administered by the Burundi National Center of Information Technology, the registry site states that. BI Registry has a rather liberal policy about domain names as soon as the domain name is in relation with the business name or one of its marks. The general principle is that a domain must reflect the truth, registrations are open to anybody worldwide, but are not supposed to be registered or used for misleading purposes, though apparently no pre-screening is done to ensure this. The site also states that We strongly discourage the use of suffixes of our country for misleading people and we remind that. bi stands for Republic of Burundi and for nothing else. This is apparently intended to discourage the repurposing of. bi as has been done with other ccTLDs, or the use in domain hacks where the TLD becomes part of a word or phrase. Use of bi in the sense of bisexuality is likely the sort of thing they are aiming to prevent and it is used by the Israeli company Vision. bi, which develops Business Intelligence software. There does not seem to be much use at all, either within or outside Burundi
13.
.br
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. br is the Internet country code top-level domain for Brazil. It was administered by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee until 2005 when it started being administered by Brazilian Network Information Center, a local contact is required for any registration. Registrations of domain names with Portuguese characters are also accepted, with the exception of universities, the second-level domain is fixed and selected from a list that defines the category. For example, site. art. br is in the art category, institutions of tertiary education were allowed to use the ccSLD. edu. br, although some use. com. br and others use. br. There are also some few exceptions that were allowed to use the second level domain until the end of 2000. As of April 2010, most domain registrations ignore categories and register in the. com. br domain, the. jus. br, and. b. br domains have mandatory DNSSEC use. Created and delegated to Brazil in 1989 by Jon Postel, initially the domain was operated manually by Registro. br, originally, only researchers and institutions to which they belonged had the interest and ability to adopt the new system and register domains under. br. At the time, networks prevalent in the Brazilian academic setting were the BITNET, the HEPnet, as such, even before Brazil officially connected to the Internet in 1991, the. br domain was used to identify the machines participating in networks already in use by academics. The registration system was automated in 1997 and was developed using open source software, in 2017, accounts associated with DNS records of Brazilian banks were hacked. Kasperskys researchers pointed out to a vulnerability in NIC. brs website, nICs director at the time, Frederico Neves, denied that NIC. br was hacked, although NIC admitted the vulnerability. To register any domains under. br, it is necessary to enter into contact with Registro. br, Entities legally established in Brazil as a company or a physical person that has a contact within Brazil can register domains. Foreign companies that have a legally established in Brazil can also do it by following specific rules. The registration of domains with special Portuguese characters is accepted since 2005, minimum of 2 and maximum of 26 characters, not including the category. For example, in the field XXXX. COM. BR, valid characters are, the hyphen, and the following accented characters, à, á, â, ã, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú, ü, ç. To maintain the integrity of the registry, Registro. br sets up an equivalence mapping to compare domain names with, the mapping is done by converting accented characters and the cedilla for their non-accented versions and c, respectively, and discards hyphens. A new domain will only be allowed to be registered when there is no equivalent to a pre-existing domain, ATO. BR - Actors B. BR - Exclusively for banking environment use. BIO. BR - Biologists BLOG. BR - Blogs BMD. BR - Biomedics CIM. BR - Realtors CNG. BR - Scenographers CNT. BR - Accountants COM. BR - Commercial websites in general and individuals. COOP. BR - Cooperatives ECN. BR - Economy EDU. BR - Higher education institutions ENG. BR - Engineers ESP. BR - Sports ETC. BR - Entities that do not fit in other categories ETI. BR - I. T
14.
.bt
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. bt is the Internet country code top-level domain for the Kingdom of Bhutan. It is administered by the Bhutan Ministry of Communications
15.
.bw
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. bw is the Internet country code top-level domain for Botswana. It is administered by the University of Botswana, most current registrations are at the third level beneath second-level names such as co. bw and org. bw, but some second-level registrations also exist. The most visited. bw domain is google. co. bw by Google Inc. in Botswana, Botswana Telecommunications Corporation operates a WHOIS service for. bw domains
16.
.bz
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. bz is the Internet country code top-level domain for Belize. It is administered by the University of Belize, currently, the registry is in Belize, but is still marketing the domain outside the country as meaning business. Internationalized domains with an assortment of non-ASCII characters are also available. Many websites in Italy use this domain, because of the abbreviation of Bolzano, the capital of the province of South Tyrol, many websites use the Italian subdomain. bz. it. Servers for the Open Source game BZFlag often use names ending in. bz. There are some second-level domains in use, however these are not required, com. bz edu. bz gov. bz net. bz org. bz IANA. bz whois information ICANN advisory about lawsuit. bz Requirements and FAQs
17.
.ca
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. ca is the Internet country code top-level domain for Canada. The domain name registry that operates it is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, registrants can register domains at the second level. Third-level registrations in one of the geographic third-level domains defined by the registry were discontinued on October 12,2010, registrants of. ca domains must meet the Canadian Presence Requirements as defined by the registry. The first. ca domain was registered by the University of Prince Edward Island in January 1988. ca Registry, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority is a non-profit Canadian corporation that is responsible for operating the. ca Internet country code Top Level Domain today. It assumed operation of the. ca ccTLD on December 1,2000, on April 15,2008, CIRA registered its one millionth. ca Internet domain name. Any. ca registration has to be ordered via a certified registrar, uBCs registry operations once favoured fourth-level names for purely local entities or third-level names for entities operating solely within one province. Nationally incorporated companies could have a. ca domain, while provincially incorporated companies required the letters of their province, currently, any of the above listed parties can register a domain with a name of their choosing followed directly by. ca. CIRA stopped accepting new registrations for third-level domains on October 12,2010, citing complexity, gc. ca is actually a standard domain like all other. ca domain names. CIRA does not register domain names under. gc. ca directly, the. mil. ca second-level domain name is also a standard domain and is registered to the Department of National Defence. The. mil. ca suffix is used internally by DND on its intranet, internationalized domain names were introduced in January 2013 with a limited selection of characters to allow French language text with diacritics. Names which differ only in diacritical accents must have the same owner, Domain names that begin with the four characters xn-- are otherwise not available for registration. Length must be 2-63 characters, including the xn-- prefix encoding for internationalised domain names, names which match the name of an existing generic three-letter top level domain or the Canadian top level country code are reserved and therefore not available for new registrations. Certain expletives are not accepted as names, municipal names of individual cities and localities within Canada are also reserved nationwide, along with village. ca, hamlet. ca, town. ca, city. ca, ville. ca and the names of Canadian provinces. Exceptions were typically names registered before the restriction was introduced, such as the Canadian Governor General at gg. ca, names which exist at any of the levels are blocked in their availability elsewhere in the. ca hierarchy. Registration, if it can be done at all, requires manual intervention by the prospective registrar as the permission of all existing registrant must be obtained by CIRA. Registering this domain name requires permission from the Registrant that already holds the name, gouv. on. ca, gouv. pe. ca. However, with the agreement of these three parties New Brunswick would indeed be able to register and use gouv. nb. ca, existing third-level domain registrants looking to obtain the corresponding second-level domain are normally advised to use the same initial registrar for both names. After a thirty-day redemption period, intended to provide the original registrant one final chance to reclaim a suspended name, domains which receive no bids are then released and made openly available for new registrations
18.
.cc
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. cc is the Internet country code top-level domain for Cocos Islands, an Australian territory of 5.4 square miles and about 600 inhabitants. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus — a country the UN does not recognise — also uses the. cc domain, registration is made directly at second-level. The. cc domain is preferred by many cycling clubs, as well as churches and Christian organizations, since CC could be an abbreviation for Christian Church or Catholic Church. Some open-source/open-hardware projects, such as the Arduino project, use a. cc for their pages, since CC is the abbreviation for Creative Commons. Business owners in Southern Massachusetts are rapidly adopting Cape Cod CC domains for local identity, canadian Club whiskey has also used. cc domains for marketing purposes. A number of domain names are also maintained by CoCCA, including com. cc, net. cc, edu. cc. Although no longer actively promoted on the CoCCA web site, they will still register third-level domain names on request and they are not official hierarchies, they are domains owned by companies who offer free subdomain registration. The CO. CC company offered two free. cc subdomains, as well as discounts for ordering as many as 15,000 domain names at a time. Step-by-step instructions for registrants on how to use well known hosting services like Blogger, Windows Live, due to previously large use by website spammers of sub-domains from co. cc, in July 2011 Google removed over 11 million. co. cc websites from its search results. Googles JohnMu recommended that individuals who have legitimate sites on the. co. cc subdomain send a reconsideration request to Google to have their specific site excluded from the ban. The abundance of cheap. co. cc domains had also used by those who sold fake anti-virus programs. During 2012-2014, the co. cc website and name servers are no longer online, there was no formal statement by the company, but they did stop accepting new registrations some time before they closed
19.
.cd
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. cd is the Internet country code top-level domain for the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was created in 1997 as a replacement for the. zr ccTLD, except for reserved names like. com. cd. net. cd. org. cd and others, any person in the world can register a. cd domain for a fee. The ccTLD is popular owing to it being an abbreviation for compact disc, such unconventional uses of TLDs in domain names are known as domain hacks. IANA whois information for. cd Official home page of Congo Internet Management
20.
.cf
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. cf is the Internet country code top-level domain for the Central African Republic. It is administered by the Central African Society of Telecommunications, dot CF is an initiative of the Societe Centrafricaine de Telecommunications in Bangui, Central African Republic in partnership with Freenom. The domain has been available for free registration on Freenom website. IANA. cf whois information dot cf page Freenom, a registrar offering. cf registration
21.
.ch
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. ch is the country code top-level domain for Switzerland in the Domain Name System of the Internet. It is administered by SWITCH Information Technology Services, the domain ch derives from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for the country, which was used because of its neutrality with regard to the four official languages of Switzerland. CH is the ISO 3166-2 code for Switzerland and also is used on vehicle plates, second-level domain names must be at least three letters long. Two-letter subdomain names are restricted to the Swiss cantons, as well as the domain ch. ch of the Federal Chancellery of Switzerland, the only exception has been the former domain of the Expo.02 which was held in Switzerland, www. expo.02. ch. Registrations of internationalized domain names have been accepted since March 2004, the Federal Office of Communications has begun registering. swiss domains as of 7 September 2015. This is meant to augment the traditional. ch TLD, applicants must currently have a registered place of business and a physical administrative base in Switzerland to apply
22.
.cl
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. cl is the Internet country code top-level domain for Chile. It was created in 1987 and is administered by the University of Chile, registration of names including accented letters, ñ and ü was opened up in 2005. Since April 2011, it supports DNSSEC, the zone is signed, microsoft uses it in a domain hack for its social networking service so. cl. In the Hurricane Electric report from May 2012, it appears as IPv6 enabled domain, internationalized domain name Internet in Chile NIC Chile is currently the domain registrar for the. cl ccTLD IANA. cl whois information Syntax rules for domain names under. CL in NIC Chile site
Gambia