Domain names in Turkey
With the well-developed information technologies and the increasing use of internet in the commercial life, domain names are now as important as brands.
To have a better understanding on the subject, it is useful to have a look at some terminology.
Www, "World Wide Web", means a world wide web or network. So if you think of the internet as a highway, you can think of www as the name of that path. Therefore, this word has no distinctiveness.
Domain extensions like .com, .net, .org.com.tr are derived because of the diversity of the internet world and the increased need for such a solution. Many of the domain extensions have a meaning. For example, .com is derived from English word “company”. In Turkey, METU, Middle East Technical University, is the only authorized institution to register domain names with .com.tr.
For the .com.tr domain name acquisition, documents such as trademark registration certificate and trade registry record are requested from persons or institutions. With this practice, disputes that occur in internet domain names with .tr extension and malicious domain name allocations are minimized.
International domain names such as .com and .net are given by ICANN, the International Domain Name Assignment Institution, according to the first come first served rule.