ICANN Approves 1 and 2 Character Domain Names for .Coop

.Coop now supports the registration of both single and two character domain names. These special domains can be registered through participating .coop registrars after the submission of a brief Expression of Interest and dotCoop approval. On 7 November 2008 at the ICANN meeting in Cairo, Egypt, the ICANN Board approved the contract amendment requested by dotCoop in May 2008 to allow the registration of these unique domain names in the .coop name space.

dotCoop has now established an application process for any eligible .coop registrant to submit an Expression of Interest to register any of these select names. Please review the Application Process for Single and Two Character .Coop Domain Names on this site.

dotCoop's request was approved at the same time as a similar request was approved for the .mobi TLD but the approval clearly noted that restrictions on these special and valuable domains for other TLDs such as .com will continue at this time.

Single character domains include the letters a-z and single-digit numerals (0-9). There are still restrictions on 2-character names that are the same as country codes (such as .us or .de) - please review the Application document for more details.

The process basically asks those interested in the domains to submit a short memo or Expression of Interest (EOI). Initial EOI's will be accumulated for a three month period to ensure equal access during this initial release. Any unique EOIs that meet the general criteria will be approved and can be registered. Any domains with more than one EOI will be evaluated during the three month period and awarded to the eligible registrant that provides the best and highest value of the domain to the cooperative community.

To assure that these names are equally available to all co-ops, these registrations are available to registrars at the standard price and the whole process is streamlined to make it easy for co-ops to qualify and use these special names that are only available to co-ops at this time!

Please contact dotCoop with any questions at +1-202-383-5453 or at support@nic.coop. Your .coop registrar will also be able to tell you how you can register one of these domains.

Published on 03 December 2008