.nu
 |
|
| Introduced | 1997 |
|---|---|
| TLD type | Country code top-level domain |
| Status | Active |
| Registry | .SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) |
| Sponsor | Internet Users Society - Niue |
| Intended use | Entities connected with  Niue
|
| Actual use | Used for a multitude of sites all over, few with any connection to Niue; especially popular in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium since "nu" is Swedish, Danish and Dutch for "now" |
| Registration restrictions | None |
| Structure | Registrations permitted at second level |
| Documents | Terms and conditions |
| Dispute policies | UDRP |
| Website | NuNames |
| DNSSEC | yes |
.nu is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the island state of Niue. It was one of the first ccTLDs to be marketed to the Internet at large as an alternative to the gTLDs .com, .net, and .org. Playing on the phonetic similarity between nu and new, it was promoted as a new TLD in which there was an abundance of good domain names available.
As of September 2, 2013 .SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) has assumed responsibility for administration and technical operation of the .nu domain.
The .nu domain is particularly popular in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, as nu is the word for "now" in Swedish, Danish and Dutch - an example of a domain hack. "Nu" is also an archaic adverb meaning "now" in Norwegian, but "nå" is the more frequently used word and hence .nu is currently not used much by Norwegians. Partially owing to restrictive domain rules for the ccTLD assigned to Sweden, .se, .nu was used for creative marketing of websites such as www.tv.nu to show what is currently showing on TV, and in the Netherlands for websites like waarbenjij.nu, Dutch for whereareyou.now.
In March 2000, .NU Domain Ltd became the first TLD to offer registration of Internationalized domain names, supporting the full Unicode character set. Unlike other TLDs, no browser plugin or punycode capable browser was required on the client side for use of these names, as .NU Domain's web servers converted and redirected any web queries issued in a variety of international character encodings. However, in March 2010, .NU Domain announced at ICANN that they had recently disabled their general wildcard domain name resolution technology, and thus were implementing IDNs only by the now standard punycode implementation, and were reducing the accepted set of IDN characters for .NU Domain names to a subset of the ISO-8859-1 western European characters.
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