On August 30, the .ZUERICH new general top-level domain went into sunrise. Trademark owners will be able to register their brand-dot websites in the domain until the end of September. Then there will be a month-long limited registration period. General availability in .ZUERICH comes November 22, on the condition that the registrant either lives in the Zurich canton or is a legal entity registered there.
.ZUERICH can be considered the latest geo-gTLD, although the Zurich authorities came up with the idea back in 2011. Unfortunately, Zurich had bad luck with the DNS requirements: the canton’s official language is German, and its German name has a diacritic above the letter u — Zürich. This means the original spelling was impossible to register. The authorities refused to apply for an IDN and after long thought chose ZUERICH instead.
However, it took even more time to resolve numerous technical and bureaucratic problems related to managing the domain zone. According to Domain Incite, .ZUERICH was added to the DNS root zone in late 2014. Its first restricted registration phase started in 2017, but the launch stalled again. As of August 30, there were only 25 active domain names registered in the gTLD, but a web search reveals only one active non-registry website — an addiction treatment center. Let’s hope that now business will finally take off in .ZUERICH.
