Enter the Liechtenstein market with a .LI Domain

No. The registry poses this question on its own pages and answers it directly: you do not have to be a Liechtenstein citizen or resident to register a .li name. The ordinance likewise contains no provision on the registrant's nationality, residence or place of establishment; its grounds for refusal concern the name itself rather than the person. A company in Türkiye, a sole trader and a private individual are subject to identical terms, and no documents, local address or trustee are required. The registry also states the flip side plainly: you cannot assume a Liechtenstein person or company sits behind every .li name.

There is no term at registry level. The registry's terms define registration as open-ended and let a name end only through deletion or transfer; the ordinance contains no term clause either, describing the right acquired on allocation as a transferable and exclusive right of use. The annual period you see at your registrar is a billing period at provider level. The practical consequence is that the generic-extension chain of «expired, you are in the grace period» does not operate here and a name never lapses by itself. It is deleted when your registrar files a deletion request, so what matters is your payment relationship with your provider.

Three characters. The annex to the ordinance requires the name, or its punycode equivalent, to consist of «3 to 63 characters», and the registry's terms treat anything shorter than three or longer than sixty-three as a direct ground for refusal. The single exception is not one you can buy: in justified cases the regulator may allow a shorter name where an overriding public interest warrants it and the name will be used by the state or its institutions. The upper limit of sixty-three applies to the punycode form, so a name with umlauts shows fewer visible characters.

Yes, since 1 March 2004. The annex to the ordinance lists the permitted characters one by one: a–z, 0–9, the hyphen and thirty-two accented Latin letters such as ä, ö, ü, é, à and ç. The name enters the DNS in punycode form: bücher.li appears in the zone file as xn--bcher-kva.li. A commercially important caveat applies: the form with umlauts and the plain form are separate names and are not issued together automatically, so if you want both you must register both. The registry also gives no guarantee that such names work smoothly in every browser and mail client.

Yes, within the transition period. A deleted name is not released for re-allocation immediately: the registry's terms and support pages announce this period as forty days, during which no third party may register the name while your registrar can re-register it for you on request. The ordinance, for its part, sets a minimum of thirty days before the name becomes free. The safe reading is that you have at least thirty days, and forty according to the practice the registry publishes. If your registrar goes bankrupt or its contract ends, you have ninety days to move management elsewhere.

Fewer than a fifth. The registry's own statistics pages give the figures: only about eighteen percent of names belong to holders based in Liechtenstein, more than a third are held in Switzerland, and over sixty percent are registered to a company or organisation rather than an individual. This does not weaken the extension's identity claim, but it sets your expectations correctly: .li is not a locals-only zone, and registering from abroad is the rule here. With a little over seventy thousand names in the zone, short words long gone in the large extensions can still be free.

No. The ordinance lists the fields the registry must keep in a closed set: the name itself and its punycode form, the name servers, whether the name is protected with DNSSEC, the date of first allocation, and the particulars of the registrar managing it. Publishing holder data is not mandatory; the registry may publish it only where the holder is a legal entity or has consented. Those who credibly establish a legitimate interest are granted online access, and the registry may charge a reasonable fee for it. You can check what appears for your name on the whois search page.

Not through the procedure familiar from generic extensions, but through the registry's own two-stage service. The ordinance obliges the registry to set one up and frames it: proceedings are conducted by neutral and independent experts, the decision cannot award damages and concerns only the lawfulness of the allocation. The first stage is a conciliation call lasting no more than one hour; if no settlement is reached, an expert decision may be requested at the second stage. Substantively, the basis is a clear violation of Swiss or Liechtenstein trademark and unfair-competition law. An expert decision binds the registry unless civil proceedings are filed in time.

Do not confuse the two operations. For a change of registrar you request the transfer code (Auth-Code) from your current provider and pass it to the new one; the ordinance requires the registry to provide a technical and administrative procedure that makes this move simple, the holder does not change, and because registration is open-ended no days are lost. A change of holder is a separate procedure: the name is transferred to a third party through the managing registrar at the holder's request, and the third party must meet the conditions of allocation. Start on the domain transfer page.