Used for a multitude of sites, few with any connection to Niue; especially popular inSweden,Norway,Denmark, theNetherlands andBelgium as the wordnu in Swedish, Danish and Dutch means "now"
.nu is the Internetcountry code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the island state ofNiue. It was one of the first ccTLDs to be marketed to the Internet at large as an alternative to thegTLDs.com,.net, and.org.
Playing on the phonetic similarity betweennu andnew in English, and the fact thatnu means "now" in several northern European languages, it was promoted as a new TLD with an abundance of good domain names available. The .nu domain is now controlled by theInternet Foundation in Sweden amid opposition from the government of Niue.
Google treats .nu as ageneric top-level domain (gTLD) because "users and website owners frequently see [the domain] as being more generic than country-targeted."[2]
Unlike most ccTLDs, .nu is not administered by a representative of its country.
In 1997, IANA awarded administration of .nu to The IUSN Foundation (formerly 'Internet Users Society - Niue'), aMassachusetts-based non-profit organisation.[3][4][5][6] The administration and technical operation of the domain were transferred toThe Internet Foundation in Sweden (IIS) in September 2013.[7][3] The IIS said that 66.7 percent of "active" .nu domains at the time were registered to Swedish users.[3]
The government of Niue has been trying to administer the .nu ccTLD since at least 2003.[8][9] In November 2018, the government of Niue initiated a lawsuit against the IIS in theStockholm District Court to obtain control over the domain. It stated that the Foundation had "taken over Niue's .nu domain without consent in 2013", resulting in a significant loss of revenue for the country. Niue's government stated that the .nu domain was a "national asset of Niue" and had been taken over "unfairly", estimating that it had earned between $27 million and $37 million for the IIS.[10][3] A later estimate by Niue's legal team stated that the country had missed out on a total ofUS$150,000,000 (equivalent to $182,248,939 in 2024) during the combined time that the domain had been administered by IUSN and the IIS.[11] The IIS responded by saying that "It was and is essential for the Swedish internet infrastructure that .nu works in a stable and secure way", and that it had "done the necessary investigations before deciding to become the registry in 2013, involving several leading legal specialists and a direct contact with the relevant governmental institutions".[3]
The government of Niue continues the legal discussion on two fronts: directly withICANN to get the domain name back, and with the Swedish government to reclaim the lost profits.[12]Toke Talagi, thePremier of Niue from 2008 to 2020, called it a form ofneo-colonialism.
While Niue lost its case in the lower court ofSödertörns Tingsrätt, they appealed, and the court date for the appeal has been set to 19 and 20 May 2025 inSvea Hovrätt.
The .nu domain is particularly popular inSweden,Denmark, and theBenelux region, asnu is the word for "now" inSwedish,Danish andDutch[13] – an example of adomain hack. Althoughnu inNorwegian is an archaic word for "now", withnå being used instead,[14] .nu was initially more popular than .no, with 43,000 .nu addresses being registered inNorway in 1999 compared to 30,000 .no ones.[15] Partially owing to restrictive domain rules for theccTLD assigned to Sweden,.se, .nu was used for creative marketing of websites such aswww.tv.nu to show what is currently showing on TV, and in the Netherlands for websites likewaarbenjij.nu (lit.'whereareyou.now').
A former political party in Israel,Kulanu, used the domainwww.koola.nu[16] until its dissolution in 2020.
In March 2000, .NU Domain Ltd became the first TLD to offer registration ofInternationalized domain names,[17] supporting the fullUnicode character set.[18] Unlike other TLDs, no browser plugin orpunycode 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 theISO-8859-1 western European characters.[19]
.NU domain names are revoked without refund for displaying images ofchild pornography, being involved withphishing,spamming, email theft, search engine abuse, or any unlawful purpose.[20]
In February 2012,library.nu, a site listing links to scanned books, a substantial number of which are claimed to be pirated copyrighted material, went offline after a coalition of the world's largest book publishers obtained an injunction against the site. A few days later the site also had its domain name revoked by domain registrar Nunames. The domain revocation was recorded in screenshots taken at the time.[21]
A 2005UDRP case regardingnudomain.com[22] made the assertion under "Factual background" that "The Complainants [WorldNames, Inc. and NU Domain Ltd] own and operate the .NU ccTLD". The companies in question are operating the registry for.nu on behalf of the Internet Users Society, but it is incorrect to state that they "own" the TLD, as TLDs in general are delegated and managed rather than "owned".[23][24] The case does, however, point out that these companies own a registered trademark to ".nudomain" in several countries.
