During the past few months, things seem to have improved considerably with domain registrations for .GR – the Greek ccTLD.
The .GR and the GR.com TLDs can both be used worldwide.
While it used to take up to 30 days to manually approve the application for a .GR domain registration, the processing time has been reduced to five calendar days.
Since 1993, the .GR Registry, operated by FORTHnet – the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Technology – complies with the current Greek laws regarding the evaluation of applications for .GR domain registrations.
What that means is, that despite the ability to register .GR domains “on the spot”, registrants wait for their application to be reviewed and subsequently approved or rejected by the National Committee of Communications and Postal Services, long after a .GR domain is actually registered and enabled.
In other words, the technocrats in Greece have to sit and wait for the bureaucrats, as the latter process applications manually due to a set of regulations that dictate which domain names are registrable and which are not.
For example, geo-domains are not permitted in the .GR ccTLD, as they are reserved and allocated to the cities and municipalities that they represent.
An alternative to .GR domains has been the introduction about a year ago of the CentralNIC operated GR.com Registry.
“The GR.com registry is an alternative domain solution that can work for many regions and with different goals. Its main benefit is that can be used anywhere where GR has a specific meaning and raise any local restrictions for the domain usage.”
So while the .GR red tape has been reduced considerably, CentralNIC-managed GR.com domains offer an attractive alternative with a large pool of generics being available to register for those with an audience in Greece.
For more information, visit GR.com
