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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.
.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
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.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
4.
.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
5.
.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
6.
.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
7.
.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
8.
.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
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.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
Gambia