The Return of the Columbian TLD (.co)
The Columbian TLD of “.co” was originally delegated on December 24th, 1991, to the Universidad de los Andes, which is located within Columbia. During 2001, the University explored the exploitation of the domain for commercial purposes, attempting to treat it as just another “.com” domain name.
Due to these actions, and in response, some legal action and activity was taken to prevent this, and the Minister of Communications wrote to the University asking them not to proceed with this course of action.
On February 12th, 2002, the current delegate of the TLD (the university) wrote to ICANN stating that it had “terminated the .CO country-code top-level domain commercialization process and has further decided not to appoint a new registry operator.” It further went on to say that the University was experiencing “great difficulty” in operating .CO in light of the December 2001 council decisions, as well as the legal actions concerning the commercialization.
A little later that same year, in May, the Minister and Vice-Minister of Communications along with the University parties met at ICANN’s offices in Los Angeles, CA to discuss the future administration of the TLD, the meeting was successful and thus allowed the University to keep control of the TLD.
Due to further problems with the University handling the needs of running a TLD, in late 2009 ICANN begun considering handing off the ownership and delegation of the TLD to a more capable and responsible party, and as of early 2010 the TLD is now owned and delegated by the “.CO Internet SAS (“The Concessionaire”)”.
Also, commercial organizations and personal entities may now register domains under the “.co” TLD, as of around this late summer, big companies such as GoDaddy and NameCheap begun allowing anyone to register domains under the TLD again.
This was a brief overview of what happened with the “.co” TLD, you may read the full length IANA article. This is important to the internet community since you could easily accidently mistype a “.co” for a “.com” and be misled or taken to an entirely incorrect website.
