.pw

Status:	Active
country:	Palau
Manager:	.pw The Professional Web
Registry Provider:	CentralNic
Registrations:	250,000+
Date Implemented:	1997
Type:	ccTLD
More information:

.pw is the ccTLD for Palau. It is an Open Use ccTLD managed, and marketed to a wider professional audience, by .pw The Professional Web. It was first introduced in 1997, and was originally restricted to use by residents and companies in Palau.

The domain was relaunched as an Open ccTLD in October, 2012, in the midst of ICANN 45 in Toronto. The new registry entity, a subsidiary of Directi, is Professional Web, which matches the acronym and target audience for the namespace.

The original plan for the TLD was to use it to create a bundled social network and vanity email service, which was discontinued. EnCirca licensed the TLD to Directi in 2004.

Second-Level Domains

The second level domains for use within in Palau are:

• co.pw: for commercial use
• ne.pw: for technology service providers
• or.pw: for non-commercial organizations
• ed.pw: for educational institutions
• go.pw: for governmental agencies only
• belau.pw: for indigenous art, history and culture use, tourism and general purposes

Premium Names

The first sales of premium names were announced in March 2013, w.pw and p.pw sold for $8,000 each, both to the same buyer. It was announced at the same time that the Landrush Period was extended to accommodate a growing list of registrars and their interest in the extension.

Developments

A few months after the string was made available to the general public, spammers were widely abusing the domain, causing security companies to issue warnings to customers or block the domain wholesale. Directi stated that it has a zero-tolerance policy to spam and is fighting back, including deactivating about 5,000 domains for breaching its anti-abuse policy. The company also noted that such levels of spam are commonplace since spammers generally start using a new TLDs immediately while the general public is slower to register new TLDs.