January 17, 2013
On January 13, the .CZ country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) celebrated 20 years of existence - and over a million domain names registered.
The .CZ extension replaced the prior .CS suffix, which had been operating since 1991 and became defunct after the former Czechoslovakia was split up.
At the time of the birthday celebration announcement, there were over 1,012,000 .CZ domains registered. The extension is the most popular TLD in the Czech Republic.
"This is primarily the result of two breakthrough developments, the first being the relaxation of rather strict registration rules in 1997," said Ondřej Filip, Executive Director of the CZ.NIC Association.
"After this decision, domains could also be registered by individuals. Ten years later, CZ.NIC deployed FRED, its own system for domain administration and registration, which has made the registration process much faster and cheaper."
Mr. Filip says since that time, around 10,000 new. CZ domain names have been registered each month.
Perhaps the birthday announcement spurred additional interest in .CZ; as at the time of writing the number of names registered had risen substantially to 1,015,029 according to the CZ.NIC web site.
CZ.nic is the domain name registry operator; founded in 1998 by local Internet Service Providers. The association currently has 106 members.
CZ.NIC is also a member of the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR). Australia was accepted as an Associate Member of CENTR in October last year.
.CZ trivia (current as at January 2013)
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