Enter Libya market with a .COM.LY Domain

Organisations that provide commercial services. The registry's regulation dedicates com.ly to exactly that purpose and adds that registered trade names and marks may also be registered as domain names beneath it. The applicant does not have to be Libyan: measurement shows foreign-held records that have been active here for years, so a company incorporated abroad can hold its name for the Libyan market in this space. Allocation is first come, first served, and there is no reservation procedure or waiting list. Registration runs only through accredited registrars; the registry takes no applications directly.

Both sit with the same registry under the same regulation; the difference is level and restriction. .ly is registered directly at the second level and asks about no purpose, but for names shorter than four characters it requires a local presence in Libya and issues them only through the country's national operator. .com.ly sits at the third level, is dedicated by the regulation to entities providing commercial services, and the local-presence condition on short names does not apply there. In practice the two are complements rather than alternatives: taking both is the direct way to close your name in the Libyan market.

From one year up to ten. The registry gives the term in a single sentence on its own questions page and draws no distinction between extensions; the whole range is genuinely usable, and two-year or five-year registrations are equally possible. Measurement confirms it: beneath com.ly there are active records opened with one-year, two-year and ten-year terms. A longer term does two things for you — it cuts the number of renewal dates you have to track, and it lowers your exposure to the outage that follows a forgotten renewal. You pick the term at checkout and extend it later by renewing.

Yes, within a defined window. Under the lifecycle the registry publishes, the name is removed from the zone file one day after expiry and put on hold, so your site and mail stop that same day. 45 days after expiry a 30-day redemption period opens, and within that window your registrar can carry out the restore. At the end of those 30 days the name moves into the deletion queue, where only the registry can bring it back for a further 5 days. Once that runs out the name is deleted and open to anyone. Restoration is possible, then, but the outage starts on day one.

Yes, in full. The registry's regulation says so up front: the registrant's name, telephone number, fax number, email address and other contact details will be publicly accessible. Measurement matches — in the com.ly records queried, the holder's name, street address, city, country, telephone and email all come back unmasked, with no redaction line anywhere. No privacy service is offered for purchase either. That is why it makes sense to enter a business address you are content to see published, and a separate mailbox for the contact email. You can see what is published on the whois search page.

In four steps. First you confirm the name is eligible: the lock must be off and the status active. Then you verify that the registrant and administrative email addresses are current, because the whole process runs through them. Third, you obtain the transfer authorisation code; the registry issues it through your current registrar and can also generate it through the key retrieval option on its own lookup page. Finally you hand the code to the provider you are moving to. Transfers started before the lock is lifted are rejected. Start on the domain transfer page.

Only English letters, digits and the hyphen. The name must begin with a letter or a digit and end with a letter or a digit; names that start or end with a hyphen are invalid. Measurement confirms it: queries with a leading or trailing hyphen are not processed as a valid name by the registry's system, which returns an error instead. Names in Arabic script are not supported in this zone, because the registry's name composition rule allows the English character set only. There is a content screen as well: names containing words contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality are refused through a prohibited-string list.

The Libyan state, together with the parent zone .ly. On 30 October 2025 IANA transferred management of .ly, and therefore of the com.ly namespace beneath it, to GACI, the General Authority of Communications and Informatics in Tripoli, created by the Government of National Unity. The manager recorded before the transfer was the country's national telecom company, dissolved years earlier. The technical side did not change: name servers and the registration system are still run by Libya Telecom and Technology (LTT), and com.ly is not a separate zone but a node inside the .ly zone. The parent zone entered the root in 1997.