A domain suffix exlusively for U.S. counties:
owned and operated by the U.S. county community.

There are 3,142 U.S. counties of which 1,000 serve populations larger than 50,000 citizens and in excess of 2,000 counties which serve 15,000 citizens or more! Counties would have their individual .county domain name and the Internet user (the citizens of a county they live in or visit) could intuitively "guess" the right web address:

  • broward.county

  • queens.county

  • cook.county

  • bexar.county

  • bronx.county

  • fresno.county

  • essex.county

 

Likely by 2026/2027 for the only 2nd time in history after 2012 entities can apply for their own domain suffix at ICANN.
.county will be a community based new gTLD application by dotCOUNTY, LLC; an U.S. based public benefit non-profit entity owned by stakeholders in the U.S. county community. Every single registration will be authenticated by the relevant State Government entity. Each county will be eligible to secure up to 5 different domains per registration fee; for example for San Bernardino County in California could secure:

  • sb.county - would probably be the main domain (current URL: sbcounty.gov)

To cover different versions and to make it easier for people to "guess" the right web address at no extra cost they could secure:

  • sanbernardino.county

  • san-bernardino.county

  • bernardino.county



dotCOUNTY, LLC will operate as a public benefit non-profit. The tiered registration fees will be calculated on cost base. Counties vary immensely in size: Serving in excess of 10 Million citizens Los Angeles County has a US $30 Billion annual budget. Serving just about 100 people "Loving County" in Texas is 100,000 times less populated and has to operate with an annual budget of just about US $1 Million. A tiered registration fee model will grant fair access to ".county" domain names: Some will pay a little more while some will be granted their .county domain name for free. The goal is to have all U.S. counties using "their" .county domain name.

A certain subset of county names is not unique: several counties share the same name. As one can imagine this is especially true for names like:

  • Washington County

  • Jefferson County

  • Franklin County

  • Monroe County

  • Lincoln County

  • Madison County

Being some of the most prominent historical political figures several states wanted to honor their patriotic work. But county names are unique within each state. The allocation of .county domain names in these cases will be following a dual approach:

  • There will be a domain washington.county - it will be operated by dotCOUNTY, LLC and will list all "Washington Counties". There will be links to unique .county based domains that will be assigned to these Washington Counties!

  • Each Washington County will be assigned the .county domain name washingtonxx.county - with xx being the official two letter state code. Washington county in Arkansas will be assigned washingtonar.county - and that domain would be listed at washington.county!

  • Additionally each of the Washington counties can request up to four more .county domain names. For example washingtonarkansas.county

 




For more information please send an email to alexander.schubert@dotcounty.org or call +1(202)684 6806