One of the consequences of Montenegro’s split from Serbia was the country’s need for its own top level domain, following its departure from .yu and .cs. In September 2007, ICANN settled for .me, potentially setting up another odd, little-country bonanza like .tv and .to.
Miquel Hudin Balsa relates his experience playing around to get a tasty .me name. The process looks like it’s set up as much to monetize the connection to the English-speaking world as to actually get people in Montenegro registered. As for the assignment itself, 21 of a possible 26 dot-m-whatever combinations were already taken; Macau, Malta and Mongolia had already claimed some of the likelier candidates.
There’s a second-level academic domain like the UK has. I sure hope that some wag will name servers on it after Warner Brothers cartoon characters.
For the misanthropes out there, bad news. (Is there any other kind for misanthropes?) The registrar says that the domain bite.me “is a premium domain and has not yet been scheduled for release.”
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September 17th, 2008 at 7:41 am
It’s worth noting that the selection of the two character code assigned to countries is made by the ISO 3166/MA (http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm), not ICANN.
September 17th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Oh right, collapsed that bit. ICANN said, ok, we’ll use the ISO code as the TLD. Thanks.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Betcha mini.me was snapped up in a New York minute.
September 18th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Nope. Premium domain, up for auction later. Maybe someone should bid ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!!!
September 21st, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Hi Doug, can you give me a shout by mail, I am in Tbilisi now