Enter Somalia market with a .ORG.SO Domain

No. The registry's description of the namespace as non-profits and organisations is a statement of purpose, not a verified condition: no statutes, no incorporation documents and no proof of tax-exempt status are requested. Eligibility checks exist only for the federal state namespaces and the official zones .gov.so and .edu.so, and .org.so is in neither group. There is likewise no residency requirement and no local contact requirement. Private individuals may register too, since the registry does not demand a legal entity for this namespace.

Mostly Somalia's own institutions. The measurement of 15 August 2026 found the country's national human rights commission, the Somali chapter of Transparency International, the national research and education network, several education academies and relief foundations, and political organisations in the zone. That picture matches the registrar split: of 145 sampled names, one hundred and thirty-one were held through registrars inside Somalia, and eighty-three of those sat with a single Mogadishu company. The zone is fed from inside the country.

On paper there is none: both are namespaces of the same registry, under the same rulebook, the same expiry chain and the same minimum length. The difference is in who registers there. On 15 August 2026, 131 of the 145 names on .org.so sat with registrars inside Somalia, whereas on .com.so sixty-five of 94 names sat with registrars abroad. So .org.so is institutional and local, .com.so commercial and international. The measured name count is also higher on the .org.so side.

Three characters. The boundary was measured on 15 August 2026 using randomly generated labels against the registry's own lookup endpoints: every one- and two-character name returned Prohibited String — Domain Cannot Be Registered, while no three- or four-character name did. It matches how the zone is actually used, since most of the acronym names here sit exactly at that floor with three letters. The same limit applies on .so and .com.so; no zone gets an exception.

One year is the base, and a multi-year term was measured directly here. The registry publishes no ceiling, but nihrc.org.so shows a registration date of 9 February 2026 and an expiry of 9 February 2028; because the name is only six months old, that is a genuine two-year initial term. Longer arrangements exist too: ssef.org.so runs from its 2021 registration to 2028, and sea.org.so from 2017 to 2027. The benefit is practical — a thinner renewal calendar reduces the risk of a missed deadline for organisations whose budgets follow grant cycles.

The name does not disappear straight away. The registry publishes the post-expiry chain day by day: on the expiry date the name auto-renews into a 45-day window, and if that is missed a 30-day redemption stage begins, followed only then by a five-day pending-delete wait. That gives you a total recovery span of 75 days. Redemption can carry a different fee, so it is worth renewing before the expiry date. The registry also defines separate five-day grace periods for new registrations, renewals and transfers.

No personal data about the holder at all. The registry server whois.nic.so uses a thin schema: the response carries only the domain itself, the registry object ID, the creation and expiry dates, the last update, EPP status codes, the name servers and the registrar's details. Name, address, telephone and e-mail fields are never published, which amounts to concrete protection for organisations working in advocacy. Run a lookup from the whois search page.

A transfer is a defined step in the registry lifecycle and carries its own five-day grace period. The mechanics are standard EPP: the transfer lock on the name must be off, and you pass the authorisation code from your current provider to the new one. You can read the lock state straight out of a WHOIS lookup — a locked name shows a clientTransferProhibited line. Since the 15 August 2026 measurement counted twenty-one different registrars inside this zone, transfers clearly work in practice. Start yours from the domain transfer page.