Country Code Top-Level Domain
A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is a TLD that represents a particular country. The top-level domain is the highest part of the domain hierarchy run by ICANN.
What is a Country Code TLD?
A country code top-level domain (CCTLD) represents a hierarchy in the domain name system (DNS) for a particular country. All ccTLDs are two letter codes representing a country. For example, in the domain name of menandmice.is the .is represents the country of Iceland.
Generic TLDs, like .com or .net, are required to follow international policies and regulations created by IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (a part of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Country code TLDs do not need to follow these regulations. Instead, they must follow country level policies and regulations.
The country code TLD creation guidelines are described in RFC 1591 and to maintain the country code TLD, IANA appoints a trustee for each ccTLD.
Recently IANA created Internationalized country code TLDs (sometimes referred to as Internationalized Domain Name, or IDN) which contain native language characters.
ccTLD | Country | IDN | DNSSEC | IPv6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
.ac | Ascension Island | Yes | Yes | Yes |
.is | Iceland | Yes | Yes |
|
.mt | Malta | No | No |
|
.nl | Netherlands | No | Yes | Yes |
.no | Norway | Yes | Yes | Yes |
.uk | United Kingdom | Yes | Yes | Yes |
.us | United States | Yes | Yes | |
.za | South Africa | Yes | Yes |