Buy .as Domain Name

No. The registry's registration agreement asks for no nationality, no residency and no company incorporated in American Samoa; the text refers to the holder simply as the «Registrant» and plainly covers individuals as well. A company registered abroad, a sole trader and a private user all register on the same terms. No local address, local representative or trustee is required, and no documents are filed. The conditions the registry does impose attach to how you use the name rather than to who you are: your statements must be true, you must intend to actually use the name, and you must not use it for any unlawful purpose. Names are allocated first come, first served.

Three characters in practice. The registry publishes no length rule, but the state of the short namespace can be measured. Every single-letter .as name we sampled is registered, and all of them were consolidated with a single holder in February 2021; not one single-letter name was free. The large majority of two-letter names sit on the registry's blocked list and answer a lookup with «Prohibited String — Domain Cannot Be Registered», meaning they cannot be taken at all. Many of the three-letter names we sampled, by contrast, are free. So the shortest name actually obtainable in a new registration is three characters.

The first term is exactly two years, and renewals then run in one-year steps. The fee clause of the registration agreement states it directly: the fee covers a period of two (2) years for each new registration and one (1) year for each renewal. Measurement confirms it independently: at the registry's lookup endpoint, the gap between a name's re-registration event and its new expiry date comes out at exactly one year. The practical consequence is that there is no one-year initial .as registration — the first term is always two years, after which you extend the name year by year.

Not under the agreement. A separate «active usage» clause requires the holder to put the name to active use on the Internet and to give the registry written notice, within a reasonable time, of any technical difficulty preventing that use. Failing this clause counts as a material breach and entitles the registry to withdraw both the use and the registration of the name. The same agreement also forbids using a name in a way that offends the values and morals of American Samoa, expressly including pornographic or racist material, and leaves that judgement to the registry alone. If the name will sit unused, at least leave a working page or a redirect on it.

No. The registry publishes no contact data at all. None of the records we queried showed a registrant, administrative, technical or billing contact block; the output carries only the domain name, the registry identifier, the creation and expiry dates, the registrar's name, the status codes and the name servers. The registry's own privacy document sets this out as policy: it states that it has held a strongly privacy-oriented line since 1997, has never shared its zone file with third parties, and has never sold contact information. The listed exceptions are registrar transfers and law-enforcement requests backed by a subpoena. Check a record on the whois search page.

There are two separate operations and they work differently. A change of registrar is possible: standard transfer locks are in active use across the registry's records, unlocked names show as open to transfer, and the registry's own privacy document lists executing a transfer from one registrar to another as a live process. A change of holder cannot be done online at all; the registry's own management page says so explicitly and asks you to email the registry to obtain the procedure for changing a domain's holder. Changes and renewals are authenticated through a link sent to the recorded address. Start on the domain transfer page.

Yes. The registry has offered internationalised domain name registration since 1 March 2005, on a first-come, first-served basis. The implementation is described as compliant with the IDNA, Nameprep and Punycode standards, and the name enters the zone file in its punycode form. The scope is limited, however, and the registry says so itself: only 92 additional UTF-8 characters are recognised on top of ASCII, and the full list of supported characters is published on the registry's own page. So not every script is available — only the characters on that list. The registry also provides a two-way Unicode-to-punycode conversion tool.

Yes, and measurement shows it at two levels. The first is the zone itself: the root zone carries a DS record for .as, and queries for the zone's signing keys return validated answers. The second is the registrant level, which is the real proof: a second-level name under .as can carry its own DS record, and the registry's lookup endpoint reports for each individual name whether its delegation is signed. So you can have DNSSEC enabled for your own name. One caveat: the registry publishes no page describing how to submit DS records and actual uptake is sparse, so you will need to arrange it through your registrar.