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.ch

Internet country code top-level domain for Switzerland

Field	Value
name	.ch
image	DotCH domain logo.png
introduced	20 May 1987
type	Country code top-level domain
status	Active
registry	SWITCH Information Technology Services
sponsor	SWITCH Information Technology Services
intendeduse	Entities connected with Switzerland
registereddomains	2,564,228
dateregistereddomains	2024-01-15
refregistereddomains
actualuse	Very popular in Switzerland and also used around the world for domain hacks
restrictions	Two letter domain names are restricted to cantons
structure	Registrations permitted at second level
document	[Terms and conditions](https://www.nic.ch/en/terms/)
disputepolicy	[Dispute Resolution Proceedings](https://www.nic.ch/en/terms/disputes/)
website
dnssec	Yes

.ch is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Switzerland in the Domain Name System of the Internet.

Naming

The domain ch, as with other ccTLDs, is based on the ISO 3166-2 code for Switzerland derived from Confoederatio Helvetica (Helvetic Confederation), the Latin name for the country, which was used because of its neutrality with regard to the four official languages of Switzerland.

Registration

Made available in 1987, only two years after .com, it is administered by SWITCH Information Technology Services.

Second-level domain names must be at least three letters long. Two-letter subdomain names are restricted to the Swiss cantons, as well as the domain ch.ch of the Federal Chancellery of Switzerland.

The only exception has been the former domain of the Expo.02 which was held in Switzerland, www.expo.02.ch.

Registrations of internationalized domain names have been accepted since March 2004.

In the Chinese domain market

.ch has been of a rising interest to Chinese domain investors for several reasons. According to EuropeID.com, the domain .ch still has many valuable English keywords and short letter and number combinations left.

A contributing factor may be because the majority of .ch registrations are in German, leaving many English words available.

In addition, with two million domains under .ch being registered, most of the reserved domains have the European market in mind, allowing valuable domains for other languages such as Chinese keywords in the Latin script being registered at a normal price.

Domain hacks

The .ch domain is very popular in domain hacks, used to spell words and names that end in "ch".

For example, Techcrunch's tcrn.ch, as well as the University of Michigan's myumi.ch and umresear.ch.

This phenomenon is not limited to English; to take another example, the domain scha.ch (Schach, German for "chess") has been registered.

.swiss

The Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM) has begun registering .swiss domains as of 7 September 2015 meant to augment the traditional .ch TLD.

Applicants must currently have a "registered place of business and a physical administrative base in Switzerland" to apply.

References

(2024-01-18). "Domain Names - Statistics".
From the online [http://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D9826.php Historical Dictionary of Switzerland]
EuropeID. (5 July 2016). ".CH's Growing Popularity as Domain for China {{!}} EuropeID".
"Legal Info - Internet Domains".
(2024-01-18). "URL Shortener".
(2015-09-09). "Launch of the new .swiss internet domain".
"Facts".

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

country-code-top-level-domains communications-in-switzerland council-of-european-national-top-level-domain-registries-members internet-in-switzerland internet-properties-established-in-1987

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