The next will be "IN"

印度網域".IN"明年起開放第二層註冊, 預計將造成搶註熱潮!!

Yes, that's true. .IN, the country code Internet identity for India, will be the major hit in the domain name market in 2005.

The Government of India decided to make the 2nd-level .IN unrestricted, whereas keeping .co.in, .net.in 3rd -level only for commecial companies and ISPs. For complete story please click here.

Update: Sorry I was wrong. .co.in and .net.in will also be open for registration. Price drop from Rs 1,500 to Rs. 250. Here is one more story about the new .IN policy. What's more interesting is that the registry will be handled by NIXI, or National Internet Exchange of India.

Remember when last year (2003) .CN opened up its second level, it grew in an exponential trend from 0 to nearly 400,000 domain names now. Besides .CN and .IN, Asian ccTLD are making an much more aggressive approach by opening up the second level to general public, such as .JP, .SG, and .HK. Some are available in local language (or IDN, Internationalized Domain Name) but since the dominant web browser, MS-IE (click here to switch to an IDN-ready browser), does not support this type of domain name encoding in its original setting, the idea needs more time to become widely accepted.

Comments

[uggs slippers]

This is a truly excellent read for me, Must admit that you are one of the greatest bloggers I ever saw.Cheers for posting this helpful blog post.

[Benson]

I got to say .IN ccTLD is a pretty cool abbreviation, but it cost some 40 USD for a year~ wow...