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.nu is the Internet
country code top-level domain A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all tw ...
(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 The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...
, and .org. Playing on the phonetic similarity between ''nu'' and ''new'' in English, and the fact that means "now" in several northern European languages, it was promoted as a new TLD with an abundance of good domain names available. The .nu domain is now controlled by the Internet Foundation in Sweden amid opposition from the government of Niue.
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
treats .nu as a
generic top-level domain Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of ev ...
(gTLD) because "users and website owners frequently see he domainas being more generic than country-targeted."


Administration

Unlike most ccTLDs, .nu is not administered by a representative of its country. In 1997, IANA awarded administration of .nu to The IUSN Foundation (formerly 'Internet Users Society - Niue'), a
Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...
-based non-profit organisation. The administration and technical operation of the domain were transferred to The Internet Foundation in Sweden (IIS) in September 2013. The IIS said that 66.7 percent of "active" .nu domains at the time were registered to Swedish users. The government of Niue has been trying to administer the .nu ccTLD since at least 2003. In November 2018, the government of Niue initiated a lawsuit against the IIS in the Stockholm District Court to obtain control over the domain. It stated that the Foundation had "taken over Niue's .nu domain without consent in 2013", resulting in a significant loss of revenue for the country. Niue's government stated that the .nu domain was a "national asset of Niue" and had been taken over "unfairly", estimating that it had earned between $27 million and $37 million for the IIS. A later estimate by Niue's legal team stated that the country had missed out on a total of during the combined time that the domain had been administered by IUSN and the IIS. The IIS responded by saying that "It was and is essential for the Swedish internet infrastructure that .nu works in a stable and secure way", and that it had "done the necessary investigations before deciding to become the registry in 2013, involving several leading legal specialists and a direct contact with the relevant governmental institutions". The government of Niue continues the legal discussion on two fronts: directly with
ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several dat ...
to get the domain name back, and with the Swedish government to reclaim the lost profits. Toke Talagi, the Premier of Niue from 2008 to 2020, called it a form of
neo-colonialism Neocolonialism is the control by a state (usually, a former colonial power) over another nominally independent state (usually, a former colony) through indirect means. The term ''neocolonialism'' was first used after World War II to refer to ...
. While Niue lost its case in the lower court of Södertörns Tingsrätt, they appealed, and the court date for the appeal has been set to 19 and 20 May 2025 in Svea Hovrätt.


Usage of .nu

The .nu domain is particularly popular in
Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...
,
Denmark Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous a ...
, and the
Benelux The Benelux Union (; ; ; ) or Benelux is a politico-economic union, alliance and formal international intergovernmental cooperation of three neighbouring states in Western Europe: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The name is a portma ...
region, as is the word for "now" in Swedish, Danish and Dutch – an example of a domain hack. Although in Norwegian is an archaic word for "now", with being used instead, .nu was initially more popular than .no, with 43,000 .nu addresses being registered in
Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...
in 1999 compared to 30,000 .no ones. 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'' (). A former political party in Israel, Kulanu, used the domain ''www.koola.nu'' until its dissolution in 2020.


Internationalised domains

In March 2000, .NU Domain Ltd became the first TLD to offer registration of
Internationalized domain name An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-Latin script or alphabet or in the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacrit ...
s, supporting the full
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
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 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology—8-bit computing, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character (computing), character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character enc ...
western European characters.


Domain revocation policy

.NU domain names are revoked without refund for displaying images of
child pornography Child pornography (also abbreviated as CP, also called child porn or kiddie porn, and child sexual abuse material, known by the acronym CSAM (underscoring that children can not be deemed willing participants under law)), is Eroticism, erotic ma ...
, 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.


Litigation

A 2005 UDRP case regarding nudomain.com made the assertion under "Factual background" that "The Complainants orldNames, Inc. and NU Domain Ltdown 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".Computerworld NZ: Niue struggles against 'digital colonialism'
, 27 March 2007
The case does, however, point out that these companies own a registered trademark to ".nudomain" in several countries.


References


Further reading

*


External links




.nu Domain Registry

IUSN Foundation

IUSN's WiFi Nation

Internet Niue

Niue is dead. Long live .nu!
The Register ''The Register'' (often also called El Reg) is a British Technology journalism, technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee (journalist), Mike Magee and John Lettice. The online newspaper's Nameplate_(publishing), masthead Logo, s ...

Official website of the government of Niue
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nu Country code top-level domains Communications in Niue