.CYM : Is this for real?

[Gerrit]

I read on Wikipedia a new extention .cym would be going live soon, and has been assigned to the Cayman Islands.

Is this a joke or is this for real?

First of all the Cayman Islands already had .ki as ccTLD and I doubt such a tiny country needs 2 extentions.

Of course .cym could stand for Cymru, which is the native name of Wales. But Wales is not a sovereign country nor a semi-sovereign one, it is part of the UK just like England and Scotland are. So no need for a Welsh extention, otherwise you could create countless new ccTLDs for regions within countries. Many Welsh sites use .com or .co.uk already as it is.

Also, I thought ccTLD's per definition were two characters. So how can the Cayman Islands get a three-digit ccTLD?

It all sounds very odd. If this story is true and not just some joke from a Wikipedia user, I fear that we're getting into dangerous precedents. We already have so many rarely used ccTLD's that it can get hard to see the forest from the trees...

 

[googlebonn]

ICANN who control names on the Internet have turned down a request to allow people and businesses in Wales to use the .cym name.

 

[Gerrit]

Which is odd because they allowed .cat for Catalonia, which opened the door for other languages to try to grab a domain for their own linguistic field. I'm surprised the Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic haven't already tried the same. And the Basques, and some of the Russian regions who have a distinctive own language.

But even when .cym has been turned down for Wales, why give it to the Cayman Islands? Those already have .ki as ccTLD, and other than the fact a country normally has just one ccTLD, ccTLD's per definition have 2 characters rather than 3.

 

[Coopey]

I don't believe it's going live. I'm curious- where did you read this? //edit: just re-read and you say Wikipedia (it doesn't actually say it's going live there :-s )

It's reserved for the Cayman Islands as CYM is the 3 digit ISO code for that country, as KY is the 2 digit ISO code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-3

I'm not too impressed with dotCYM's alternative suggestions: http://simoncoopey.com/2011/cym-is-dead/


PS:

.scot (Scotland), .bzh (Briezh), .eus (Euskari/Basque), .gal (Galicia) and apparently now some Romanian region (I think it was .sic) are proposed linguistic/cultural extensions. The first four have been in discussion for 3 or 4 years at least.

S~