A Namespace With a Homeland
A top-level domain is the last part of a web address, after the final dot. Most people know .com, .org and country codes like .uk. Since 2014, Kurdistan has had its own: .krd.
Top-level domains come in two broad families. Country-code domains such as .iq for Iraq or .tr for Turkey are handed out from the ISO 3166 list of countries and territories. Everything else — .com, .org, .museum, .berlin — is a generic top-level domain, or gTLD.
.krd belongs to the second family. The Kurdistan Region is not a state on the ISO list, so a country code was never an option. Instead it was applied for as a geographic name in ICANN's 2012 expansion of the domain system, a route that requires the backing of the relevant government. That backing came from the Kurdistan Regional Government, which applied for the string itself.
The practical result is a namespace that behaves like any other extension — it resolves worldwide, supports DNSSEC, and is sold through the same registrars as .com — but whose policy and purpose are set in Erbil rather than in California or Geneva. It sits alongside .iq rather than replacing it.
At a glance
- String: .krd, three letters, short for Kurdistan.
- Type: generic top-level domain, applied for as a geographic name.
- Sponsor on the IANA record: KRG Department of Information Technology, Erbil.
- Open to: anyone, anywhere — no residency requirement.
From Application to Root Zone
In 2012 ICANN opened the domain name system to hundreds of new endings. The Kurdistan Regional Government applied for .krd in that round, and the string took four years to travel from paperwork to public sale.
Dates follow the IANA root database, ICANN's registry agreement record and the KRG Department of Information Technology's own announcements.
Run From Erbil
Behind every top-level domain sits a registry: the organisation that holds the master list of names and answers for the extension's policy. For .krd that organisation is a government department in Erbil.
IANA, the body that maintains the root of the domain name system, lists the sponsoring organisation for .krd as the Department of Information Technology of the Kurdistan Regional Government, at the Council of Ministers on Menarah Street in Erbil.
The registry keeps two public faces. dot.krd carries the policies, the accreditation route for registrars and the contact addresses; nic.krd is the technical side, and lends its name to the six authoritative name servers — a, b, c, x, y and z.nic.krd — that answer queries for every .krd address in the world, over both IPv4 and IPv6.
The underlying registry platform is provided by GoDaddy Registry, which runs the back end for a large share of the extensions created in the 2012 round. Policy, reserved names and eligibility remain with the KRG department; the contractor supplies the machinery.
How the extension is operated
- Registry operator: KRG Department of Information Technology, Erbil.
- Registry platform: GoDaddy Registry.
- Security: the zone is DNSSEC-signed.
- Disputes: the standard UDRP applies, as it does to .com.
Who Can Register a .krd Name
You do not have to live in Kurdistan, hold a Kurdish passport or run a company there. Registration at the second level is open to anyone in the world.
The registry does not sell names directly. Like almost every modern extension, .krd is distributed through ICANN-accredited registrars and their resellers — the same shops that sell .com — and each of them sets its own price. The registry's own guidance puts a standard name at around forty dollars a year; in practice the figure ranges from the mid-twenties upward.
A registration runs for a year at a time and can be renewed indefinitely. Names the registry classes as premium, usually short or high-demand words, carry a higher price.
Not every string is available. The registry maintains a reserved list, withholding names for cultural, political and historical reasons, and ICANN blocks a further set for technical reasons. Requests concerning reserved names, and reports of abuse, both go to the registry directly.
Before you buy
- Compare registrars — prices for the same name vary widely, and renewal prices matter more than the first year.
- Check whether the name you want is on the reserved list before planning around it.
- Trademark disputes over .krd names are handled under the UDRP, the same process used across the gTLDs.
Third-level names: co.krd, edu.krd and gov.krd
Alongside plain second-level names, the registry operates a set of restricted labels one level down. These are not open registrations: an applicant for an edu.krd name has to be an authorised representative of an educational institution operating in the Kurdistan Region, or one that teaches, researches or records its people, language, culture or history. co.krd applies a comparable test to commercial entities in good standing, and gov.krd is reserved for government bodies.
Prices, registrar lists and reserved names change. The registry's own site is the authoritative source for all three.
Who Is On .krd
A decade in, .krd is used by government bodies, universities, businesses and cultural projects — inside the Kurdistan Region and across the diaspora.
.krd remains a small namespace. Where .com counts hundreds of millions of registrations, .krd counts a few thousand. It grew quickly in the mid-2020s and has since settled into steady, modest use.
That size is part of the appeal. Short, memorable names are still there for the asking, and a .krd address says where a project belongs before a visitor has read a single word of it.