Why can't we have domain names without the .co in Zimbabwe

Question

I always wonder, why can't we have domain names without a .co for example www.techzim.zw instead of www.techzim.co.zw. Are we not unnecesarily lenghtening our domain names? Besides some countries have such domains e.g lover.ly from Libya! No lover.co.ly and lover.me? I think dropping the .co will make our domain names much cooler

Answer 1

just compiling some of the answers

as macdonald says - every country gets assigned a TLD (Top Level Domain) based on there countries ISO code for Zimbabwe that is zw

It's fairly common practice to further split this down for the various usages, for example ac.zw for academic institutions, gov.zw for government and co.zw for generic companies or other usages, and org.zw for non-profits/charities - every country is free to choose there own policy on how to do domain addressing under there own TLD and in most countries you often dont have to be a non-profit to get a .org.tld domain or be a company to get a .co.tld domain (.gov.tld domains are generally restricted for obvious reasons as well as ac.tld) - its all down to a matter of what the local internet registries have decided, but thankfully many have decided on the rough standards above

with the exception of america this holds mostly true around the world

the US actually has a tld .us and can have sites of .co.us .org.us etc but what has happened because alot of internet related technologies were birthed out of the US they have taken over the gTLD's (Global Top Level Domains) which were supposed to be country agnostic (eg for companies like apple or google which are truly multi-national) so it is often assumed that .com is for us companies

Comments

Aah, Its all clear now! But we still need the .zw without the .co can someone in charge fix that!

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zispa is in charge of .co.zw - not sure who is in charge of .zw but you likely will not see any changes in the near future if you just want a .zw domain

Answer 2

It was a long time ago I remember the times we had the likes of iharare and samara there was no ZISPA then there was some issues authorising that extension I think more than one service provider claimed to be the central Zim registry and it was disputed then partially suspended when ZISPA came (Check with UZ) Mango remain the only one (also only Zim's free ISP) using it, if I still had contact to Jim Holland I would get more. #mngole

Answer 3

We do have them. One at least. mango.zw

Comments

how to I a top level domain name like tatenda.zw?

Answer 4

We dont choose our domain randomly, we get them allocated to us. Actually, co.zw is now the most preferred standard way to make internet names and dns manageable. There are different extensions like .org, .net, .mil(used US military only), .gov etc The .co means a country The .zw means Zimbabwe. All as a single search means a country called Zimbabwe. The naming structure cannot be done randomly to suit individual needs at top level domains like country domains in our case .co.zw