.pw ccTLD Being Relaunched by Directi

Directi have announced their plans to relaunch the .pw ccTLD officially next week at the ICANN meeting in Toronto.

The country code .pw was originally assigned to Palau, which is a small island in the Pacific (I had to look it up!)

Under DirectI’s plans the .pw will be re-purposed as “professional web”, though how it’s meant to differentiate itself from the existing .pro is beyond me.

However there is a logic in the relaunch.

As the new TLD program keeps running into new TLDs launching a re-purposed ccTLD might help some of the companies involved test their registry systems further.

The arguments put forward by Directi’s Bhavin Turakhia, however, are slightly different:

“The top generics are running in a depleted state. In over 70% of the cases, consumers are unable to obtain a name of first choice, and must settle for longer, less memorable names. Moreover, for these unattractive names, they will pay more and more each year as incumbent gTLDs continue to raise prices. .pw aims to meet the global demand for shorter, first choice names at a reasonable price.” said Bhavin Turakhia, Directi’s CEO
“.pw will open up with a 68 day sunrise and will offer powerful Rights Protection Mechanisms, to ensure active protection for rights holders. We’ve been fighting a war against domain name abuse for many years. As the registry operator, we will leverage our experience in ensuring .pw comes to be known as a quality namespace.” added Business Head, Sandeep Ramchandani.

Expect more details on this via the official site from next week.

Interestingly Directi chose Centralnic to run their backend for this.