Enter the Cayman Islands market with a .KY Domain

No. The extension opened to the world on 2 September 2015, and there has been no geographic condition since: OfReg's own page says names go to anyone in the world on a first-come, first-served basis. The agreement's transitional clause sets the two regimes side by side — before 2015 registration was open only to people resident in the islands and companies on the Cayman company register, and a Cayman address and telephone number were required; after that date anyone regardless of their geographic location may register. You need no address, agent or trustee on the island. Reseller pages still advertising .ky as requiring local presence are describing the pre-2015 rules.

OfReg, the islands' Utility Regulation and Competition Office. Its own page states that the information and communications technology regulatory function is responsible for the management and administration of the .ky domain. It took the role over from its predecessor, the ICTA, whose name still surfaces in some of the registry's response text and in the registration agreement because those texts were never updated. The technical side is separate: Tucows Registry Services in Toronto operates the name servers. So your legal counterparty is the regulator in the Cayman Islands while the infrastructure sits in Canada. The registry takes no direct applications; you register through an accredited registrar.

Yes, it can. Your name can go directly under .ky with no intermediate step such as com.ky; the registry's lookup service reports free second-level names as available for registration, and second-level names have been in active use for years. The third level is not closed either: you may register beneath com.ky, org.ky, net.ky and edu.ky, each of which is a separate sub-zone signed in its own right. The single exception is gov.ky, which is reserved for the islands' government, closed to the public, and served from the government's own DNS provider rather than the registry's infrastructure.

The registration agreement lists four headings one by one. A .ky name may not be used for the display, sale, marketing or distribution of pornographic material or alcohol; for gambling or the promotion of gambling; for the bulk distribution of unsolicited email; or to defraud, abuse, annoy, threaten or harass another person. The sanction sits in the same clause: failure to comply leads to immediate revocation of the name, with any separate legal consequences on top. The agreement further requires compliance with Cayman Islands law, in particular its electronic transactions and computer misuse legislation. In practice that means .ky is the wrong address for a project whose subject matter is sensitive.

There are two separate operations. A change of registrar is permitted but carries a waiting period: the agreement states that the registrant may change the registrar of record at any time once 60 days have elapsed from the date of registration. A freshly registered .ky name therefore cannot be moved for the first two months. Most records also carry a transfer lock set by the registrar, which has to be lifted first. A change of holder is a different matter: the agreement says rights and obligations may not be assigned without the regulator's prior written consent. Start on the domain transfer page.

The UDRP applies, but the case is decided by the regulator itself rather than an arbitration provider. OfReg adopted ICANN's UDRP on 1 October 2003 and hears complaints in house. Good-faith attempts to settle must have been made between the parties first, and evidence of them has to be supplied. Once the complaint is passed on, the registrant gets twenty days to respond and the complainant ten days to reply; a trained member of the team then runs a confidential mediation, and if the case does not settle within ten days a formal decision may be requested. Decisions are published on OfReg's site. Cayman Islands courts have exclusive jurisdiction.

No, they are not. In the registry's output the registrant, administrative and technical contact fields are all masked as redacted for privacy, and instead of an email address you get a pointer back to the registrar. What a lookup does show is limited to the name itself, the registrar's details and abuse contact, the creation, update and expiry dates, the status codes, the name servers and the signing flag. Note that this is not a privacy service you buy; masking is the registry's default behaviour. You can check the state of a name yourself on the whois search page.

No, some are closed. The agreement states that certain names have been reserved by the regulator and cannot be registered without its prior agreement; when such a name is queried the registry's lookup returns neither free nor taken but a distinct message saying the name has been reserved for future registration. Names containing swear words also need prior consent and must be applied for directly to the regulator. Acceptance is discretionary as well: the agreement lets the regulator reject any application for any reason, and suspend or delete a name within thirty days of its registration. Checking a name's status before ordering is therefore the safe route.