Two Very Real and Recent Reasons to NOT Use A Country Code Domain Name (ccTLD)
PALM BEACH, FL – If you were looking for a reason to not move to a ccTLD, or country code domain name, and stick with your super-duper .com domain, no matter how weak you feel it might be, you’ve just been handed two good reasons to do so, within the last two months.
In January, I wrote about tens of thousands of websites that went out of service due to the Brexit situation where the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union. As part of the transition process, over 80,000 websites were suspended on December 31, 2020.
The good news is that while those in possession of European Union residency or citizenship were expected to be able to re-register their “.eu” domains that were revoked, 48,000 of them were expected to become available again on a first come first serve basis.
A hard lesson learned for the owners of 48,000 domains.
More recently, just this month, “.ru” domain names came under attack, with Ukraine asking ICANN to disable the “.ru” domain for Russia as well as the “.su” Soviet Union domain which remains in use. ICANN denied the request citing policies and technical limitations they say do not allow the organization to do so.
However, “.ru” domains are far from being in the clear.
- Major domain provider GoDaddy is removing Russia’s “.ru” and “. ru.com” domain names from its services
- Social media platform Reddit blocked all links coming in from Russian domain names, and
- NameCheap joined-in ending all service for Russian customers calling the Russian government’s actions war crimes.
Too bad for the innocent bystanders who chose .RU.
And the longer this all goes on the more complications will likely come to pass.
Talk about unexpected consequences for these businesses that will be crushed from the conflict between countries they had nothing to do with and never expected when simply choosing their domain names.
Not that it couldn’t happen to the king of all domains, the .com; we’ve seen that anything in this world is possible… but it sure seems a lot less likely.
About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of SEARCHEN NETWORKS®. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a how-to book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several online businesses.
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