On Tuesday, Sedo reported its weekly sales, topped by a German domain name, Gov.de.
The sale of Gov.de for 30,000 Euro (approximately $32,670 dollars) is indicative of the value of ccTLDs in their respective local markets.
Some of our readers pointed out that the “Gov” prefix is reserved in most TLDs, creating a range of .gov.ccTLD domain names that are not permitted to anyone other than government organizations.
We reached out to Sedo for information about Germany’s usage of the “gov” term. Christian Voss sent us this note, explaining the current status in Germany:
No [there are no gov restrictions, as] they all use the .de for their official sites. Some regions like Nordrhein-Westfalen using .nrw but not all so it’s not official.
With this in mind, there are no restrictions in the use of “gov” keywords in .de domain names. Furthermore, the web site of the German federal government is Bundesregierung.de.
The new owner of Gov.de might choose to operate something related to German government politics, or perhaps some type of brandable service; the domain currently resolves to a broken web server.
