Introduced 1997 | Status Active | |
TLD type Country code top-level domain Registry .SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) Sponsor Internet Users Society - Niue Intended use Entities connected with Niue | ||
.nu is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the island state of Niue. It was one of the first ccTLDs to be marketed to the Internet at large as an alternative to the gTLDs .com, .net, and .org. Playing on the phonetic similarity between nu and new, it was promoted as a new TLD in which there was an abundance of good domain names available.
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Administration
As of September 2, 2013 .SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) has assumed responsibility for administration and technical operation of the .nu domain.
Usage of .nu
The .nu domain is particularly popular in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, as nu is the word for "now" in Swedish, Danish and Dutch - an example of a domain hack. "Nu" is also an archaic adverb meaning "now" in Norwegian, but "nå" is the more frequently used word and hence .nu is currently not used much by Norwegians. Partially owing to restrictive domain rules for the ccTLD assigned to Sweden, .se, .nu was used for creative marketing of websites such as www.tv.nu to show what is currently showing on TV, and in the Netherlands for websites like waarbenjij.nu, Dutch for whereareyou.now.
Internationalised domains
In March 2000, .NU Domain Ltd became the first TLD to offer registration of Internationalized domain names, supporting the full Unicode character set. Unlike other TLDs, no browser plugin or punycode capable browser was required on the client side for use of these names, as .NU Domain's web servers converted and redirected any web queries issued in a variety of international character encodings. However, in March 2010, .NU Domain announced at ICANN that they had recently disabled their general wildcard domain name resolution technology, and thus were implementing IDNs only by the now standard punycode implementation, and were reducing the accepted set of IDN characters for .NU Domain names to a subset of the ISO-8859-1 western European characters.
Domain revocation policy
.NU domain names are revoked without refund for displaying images of child sexual abuse, being involved with phishing, spamming, email theft, search engine abuse, or any unlawful purpose.
In February 2012, library.nu, a site listing links to scanned books, a substantial number of which are claimed to be pirated copyrighted material, went offline after a coalition of the world’s largest book publishers obtained an injunction against the site. A few days later the site also had its domain name revoked by domain registrar Nunames. The domain revocation was recorded in screenshots taken at the time.
Pricing
Domain names can be as short as one character. A premium of €500/yr applies to name registrations of one character in length, €250 for domain names of two-character length, and €30 per year for domain names of any other length, although alternate registrars have two-letter domain names available for the price of normal length names. In June, 2008, .NU Domain began permitting registration of all-numeric domain names.
Litigation
A 2005 UDRP case regarding nudomain.com made the assertion under "Factual background" that "The Complainants [WorldNames, Inc. and NU Domain Ltd] own and operate the .NU ccTLD". The companies in question are operating the registry for .nu on behalf of the Internet Users Society, but it is incorrect to state that they "own" the TLD, as TLDs in general are delegated and managed rather than "owned". The case does, however, point out that these companies own a registered trademark to ".nudomain" in several countries.
McAfee SiteAdvisor
In March 2007, McAfee SiteAdvisor issued a report explaining the functionality of SiteAdvisor. As part of that report, .nu domain websites were stated to be among the highest-risk TLDs for browser exploits. However, in most other respects, .nu sites were ranked overall as a low to moderate risk. Shortly thereafter, .NU Domain issued a press release stating that SiteAdvisor had ranked .nu sites among the lowest for risk. In 2008 McAfee reported that .net and .com had become the riskiest TLDs.