On 13 January the .cz ccTLD celebrated its 25th anniversary. The country code top level domain for the Czech Republic replaced .cs which disappeared along with Czechoslovakia. According to statistics from the CZ.NIC Association, administrator of the Czech Republic’s ccTLD, there are now more than 1.3million .cz domain names.
âInternet domains have been registered in the Czech Republic since the early 1990s. At that time, those were now non-existent .CS domains. The registration of these domains was the responsibility of the computing center at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The Czech domain .CZ came to be after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993. At that time, the domain administrator covered the costs of the registration system, and the registration and use of the second level domain names was free of charge,â recalls OndÅej Filip, CEO of CZ.NIC that has been administering the national domain since September 1999.
According to public statistics from CZ.NIC, most registrants have just the one domain name, with the most common length being nine characters. In terms of regional representation, the most registrants reside in Prague, while the Karlovy Vary region has traditionally had the lowest number of them. Outside the Czech Republic, .cz domains are being registered mostly in Slovakia, Germany and the United States of America.
â.CZ is by far the most widely used domain in the Czech Republic. Two key events contributed to this fact: in 1997, relatively strict registration rules relaxed, which made it possible for natural persons to register domain names. Ten years later, CZ.NIC introduced its own FRED domain administration and registration system, which significantly accelerated the registration process and also made it cheaper,â adds OndÅej Filip.