Mauritius has become the latest small island nation to sell the
rights to its country-code top level domain name (ccTLD) to a third
party, following in the path of Tuvalu and Western Samoa. An
American company has bought the rights to control .mu, the domain
that was originally assigned to Mauritius.
Dot.Mu, based in California, is selling .mu domain names at $100
for a two year registration. The company’s web site at www.mu is
promoting the TLD as a label for music related web sites. Details
of the deal between Dot.Mu and the Mauritius authorities have not
been disclosed.
Earlier this year, Tuvalu and Western Samoa sold to commercial
third parties the exclusive rights to the suffixes .tv and .ws
respectively. The .ws domain has been promoted as an abbreviation
of ‘world site’. Previously, the Cocos Islands sold the .cc suffix
and Tonga sold the rights to sell .to.
With ICANN introducing seven new generic TLDs next year,
including .name, .biz and .info, the value of unusual country-code
TLDs is expected to reduce, particularly the less obvious domains
like .WS and .MU.
