Enter Ethiopia market with a .COM.ET Domain

The registry's contract classifies this zone for commercial entities and states that the restricted and other extensions may only be registered by the type of organisation the text names; the registry's knowledge base likewise lists com.et among the restricted extensions and says such names can only be bought by applicants who meet certain criteria or hold an authorisation. The detail of those criteria has not been published. There is no geographic condition, though: residency, nationality and an Ethiopian company appear in no text, and measurement found names in the zone held from abroad.

Both are zones of the same registry under the same end-user contract; the difference is eligibility class and level. .et is registered directly at the second level and asks the applicant for no capacity at all. .com.et is classified in the contract for commercial entities and is registered at the third level. They differ technically too: com.et is an independent zone beneath .et with its own start-of-authority record and its own DNSSEC signature, and sharing name servers does not change that. Holding the same name in both zones is possible.

No mandatory document list is published for the registration flow, and measurement found no eligibility check at the moment of registration. The contract, however, grants two separate powers: the registry reserves the right to have your identity verified with documents, and it sets the eligibility criteria for the restricted zone itself. The text of those criteria is not public. The practical consequence is this: you may not be asked for paperwork when you apply, but a registration held without a commercial capacity can be questioned later. Registering in a company name reduces that exposure from the start.

No. Every two-character label in this zone is held back by the registry. Measurement tried letter-letter, letter-digit and digit-digit combinations and none of them came back as available: the server reported neither a registration nor a free name, returning a separate restricted-class answer instead. Because control names of three characters and more showed up as free in the very same session, this is a genuine list distinction rather than a server fault. The reserved list itself has not been published, so starting your search at three characters is the practical approach.

You get ninety days. The registry starts sending notifications forty-five days before the expiry date and then holds the name for ninety days after expiry so that you can still renew it; at the end of that period the name goes back to the registry service and is scheduled for release to the public. The contract puts the same chain more bluntly: unpaid service is suspended for ninety days, after which Ethio telecom may delete the name or transfer it to another customer. The grace-plus-redemption chain of generic extensions is not published for this zone.

Yes, in full. The registry's whois server applies no blanket masking in this zone either: the registrant, admin and tech blocks are printed with name, organisation, street, city, postal code, country, telephone, fax and email. Measurement found a record whose three contacts were the same private individual, with a personal mobile number and a personal email address published openly. Using a corporate mailbox and a switchboard number at registration therefore keeps your private details off the harvesting lists. You can view your record on the whois search page.

In the flow the registry describes, the order is completed online, an invoice is then issued, and payment is made by bank transfer or through the online payment methods offered. Once the payment is verified, Ethio telecom staff activate the account manually and the customer is notified by text message and email. Activation is therefore not automatic — it depends on that verification step. The registry also gives no guarantee that a proposed name is available for registration or that it will be registered. Order through Atak Domain and following those steps is our job.

There is no administrative arbitration route here of the kind generic extensions offer. The dispute clause of the contract calls first for an amicable settlement and, failing that, refers the matter to the competent court under the applicable laws of Ethiopia; Ethiopian law governs. The registry enforces decisions that come from outside: it may cancel a registration without notice upon the decision of a court, a regulatory authority or a recognised alternative dispute resolution body. A second lever is specific to this zone — a registration outside the eligibility class can attract measures even where no trademark dispute exists.