.CO Internet S.A.S.

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Headquarters: 701 Brickell Ave.

Suite 860
Miami, Fl., USA 33131

World Trade Center
Calle 100 No. 8 A - 49
Torre B of. 507
Bogotá, Colombia

Website: .cointernet

.CO Internet S.A.S. is a company formed by Arcelandia S.A., a Colombian company, and the U.S. company Neustar Inc., for the purpose of developing and operating the .co internet registry; it is responsible for the promotion, administration, and technical operation of the .co TLD.[1]

While .co was originally the ccTLD of Colombia, .CO Internet S.A.S was created as .co became saw a gTLD; since July, 2010 it has been available to the general public outside of Colombia.[2]

.Co Internet S.A.S has decided to work with only a dozen registrars in its first year.[3] In its first 6 months (July-January 2010), some 600,000 .co domain names were registered; GoDaddy has registered about 250,000 of those.[4].

.co's History

In 1991 .co was recognized as Colombia's cTLD by IANA. Around a decade later the Universidad de los Andes, the official registrar of .co, began to research the benefits of broadening the availability of .co for commercial purposes. This began a long back-and-forth between the University, the Colombian Ministry of Telecommunication, and ICANN. Finally, in August of 2009, the Ministry announced that it had been awarded oversight of .co as an expanded gTLD.[5]

Hype

The excitement surrounding the general availability of .co has been demonstrated in a number of ways. GoDaddy has been reported to be preparing to specifically push its .co domains through its advertisements, with particular hype surrounding its role in GoDaddy's notorious Super Bowl ads.[6]

.co is expected by many to be one of the most successful new gTLDs. Its similarity to .com is references as one reason, while its association with the word "company" in many languages is another.

It was widely reported when a one-letter .co domain name, www.e.co, was sold for $81,000 by Sedo. The domain auction benefited charity and was won by Lonnie Borck of B52 Media, and Uri Kerbel from Bookmarks.com.<ref>Tech Crunch<ref>.

Twitter has also made news for using a one-word domain, t.co, to provide additional services to its customers.<ref>T.Co<ref>

References