Reserved for academic institutions, especially universities
.gv.at
Reserved for the government as well as federal and state authorities
.co.at
Intended for commercially oriented companies
.or.at
Intended for all kinds of organizations
.priv.at
Intended for private Austrian individuals
However, it is also possible to register directly at the top level.
Domains under .at, .or.at, and .co.at can be registered without restrictions. Noresidence [de] oroffice in Austria is required.[6] Only .ac.at (administered by the Austrian academic networkACOnet) and .gv.at (administered by the Vienna City Administration on behalf of theMinistry for Digital and Economic Affairs) are not freely registrable. The priv.at domain is operated by theassociation VIBE!AT.
Given the number ofEnglish words that end with -at, this presents the possibility for manydomain hacks.
Many Austriandomain names were registered forEnglish words that end with "at". Domain hacks treating "at" as a word in its own right (such asarrive.at) are widespread.
An .at domain may be between one and 63 characters in length, and registration is typically completed within minutes. Registrations ofinternationalized domain names are accepted.[7] Since 31 March 2004, the use of Germanumlauts and otherspecial characters has been supported.[8] In mid-2007, it became possible to register domains consisting solely of digits, though this met with limited interest compared to other ccTLDs.[9] Since 2004, .at has supportedinternationalized domain names (IDNs),[10] including lowercase letters from the ISO 8859-1 character set as well as the characters œ, š, and ž from the Unicode Latin Extended-A range.
Since August 2016, it has been possible to register one- and two-character .at domains. Previously, due to technical requirements dating from 1993, only domains with at least three characters could be allocated.[12][13]
The registry nic.at conducts an annual survey among holders of .at domains. In 2012, this revealed, among other things, that over half of the surveyed companies owned more than six domains, with a quarter owning more than 30.[14]
Due to the liberal registration criteria, .at has experienced steady growth in recent years. In March 2012, exactly 1.1 million domains had been registered.[15] By May 2019, the number had risen to over 1.3 million, equating to 0.15 .at domains per inhabitant. While growth in the 2000s sometimes exceeded 100,000 new domains per year, only around 55,000 were registered in total from 2015 to 2018.[16]
