.ax
.ax is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Åland, an autonomous province of Finland. The Åland government manages the domain name registry and name service (DNS) for the ax-root.
History
As a sub-national entity of Finland, the Regional Government of Åland (Ålands landskapsregering) maintained the domain ALAND.FI. domains.
On 17 February 2006, the Finnish parliament approved a modification of the laws regulating Finnish domain names to include the .ax top-level domain. During a three-year period, the aland.fi subdomain was phased out while .ax was used in parallel; no new registrations under the aland.fi subdomain were to be accepted, and all owners of domains under the aland.fi subdomain would receive registrations for the corresponding .ax domain.[1]
On 17 March 2006, Finnish president Tarja Halonen signed the bill into law, effective as of 27 March.[2] The government of Åland began accepting registrations immediately following the changing of the law.
On 9 June 2006, ICANN approved delegating the .ax top-level domain to the government of Åland.[1] The .ax domain was added to the root zone on 21 June 2006, and became active on 15 August 2006.[2] The code ax itself comes from the ISO 3166 standard, and was assigned to Åland in 2004.[3] The letter X is not included in any major or locally used language, but other possible codes were already taken, e.g. .al by Albania, .ad by Andorra, and .an by what was at the time the Netherlands Antilles.
Information and Rules
Anyone can be a user of an ax-domain name. The daily administration of ax-domain names is handled by registrars.
An ax-domain name can generally be freely selected. The law, however, has some limitations in terms of its form and content. The domain name must not be equal or imitate someone else’s protected name or trademark.[4]
Characters
A domain name must consist of at least two and a maximum of sixty-three characters.
Allowed characters in a domain name are:
- letters a-z
- figures 0-9
- other characters is eg å, ä, ö.
A domain name may not:
- begin or end with a hyphen-
- start with the characters xn--.[4]