Enter Vanuatu market with a .COM.VU Domain

No. The regulator's rules prescribe moderator approval only for gov.vu and edu.vu; com.vu is not on that list, so no trade register extract, no certificate of activity and no declaration of capacity is asked for. The regime that applies in moderated spaces — waiting for approval, being tied to an appointed registrar and facing deletion for breaching a moderation policy — does not apply to .com.vu either. If the name is free the process moves straight ahead and priority is purely chronological. You register through an accredited registrar; the registry takes no applications directly, and the registrar must verify that the name is available and that the mandatory fields are validly filled.

The registry and the rulebook are the same; the difference is the level, and it has a clear commercial consequence. .vu is registered directly at the second level, while .com.vu sits at the third level beneath a shared second-level label the regulator maintains. There is no moderation on the .com.vu side, so no extra approval step arrives. The detail that matters most is that no link of right runs between them: the rules treat the two notions as deliberately separate, and a registration at one level does not close the other. In this namespace names exist that are taken at one level and free at the other, so brand protection means planning for both.

By the same procedure as the extension above it. The key is the authorisation code called the UDAI: you request it from your current registrar and hand it to the new one. The rules expressly forbid a registrar from declining your transfer request or delaying it by withholding the code, and if it is never handed over the regulator may supply it instead. Neither the releasing registrar nor the registry may charge a transfer fee, and the register changes immediately once the gaining registrar submits the transaction — the pending window familiar from generic extensions does not exist here. A UDAI expires after a set period, so do not sit on it. Start on the domain transfer page.

Expiry alone does not remove a name. The rules state that names renew automatically and do not lapse unless they are cancelled; for the name to leave you, your registrar has to cancel it, and where the reason is non-payment it must give fourteen days' notice first. Once cancellation happens the name moves to a pending-release status and stays closed to new registration for ninety days. Treat that window as a blackout rather than a cushion: the name drops out of the zone file at the moment of cancellation, so your site and mail stop working. After ninety days it is removed from the register and open to anyone, and registrars are separately forbidden from holding cancelled names back for resale.

Yes, by default. The rules enumerate the fields a whois response must carry and that list includes the registrant's, administrative and technical contact details. Lookups against real .com.vu registrations confirmed it: holder name, organisation, address, telephone and email all appeared in the clear. The automatic redaction you know from generic extensions does not exist in this zone. If you want your personal details kept out of the record, you have to take the privacy service your registrar offers; it works at the same registry, and records held that way show a proxy organisation instead. Check how your own record looks on the whois search page.

Through the courts. The rules leave no room for doubt: an argument about who has the better right to a name belongs to the legal system of the Republic of Vanuatu, the regulator has no role in deciding it, and it acts only on the order of a Vanuatu court or a tribunal of competent jurisdiction. The fast administrative procedure known as UDRP in generic extensions simply does not exist in this zone. The same text also removes the regulator from questions of illegal use, website content and possible breaches of legislation. Practically, a trademark complaint here starts with legal advice rather than with a filing form.

Yes. Nowhere in the rules is there a requirement to be established in Vanuatu, to show a local address, to appoint a local representative or to file documents, and the clause expressly covers the third level: any eligible applicant may register an available name at the second or third level on a first come, first served basis. The policy also makes it a principle that registrars should be neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by sitting inside or outside Vanuatu. Measurements found registrations under this space opened through different registrars, so the space is not locked to a single local company. Registration runs through an accredited registrar; the registry takes no applications directly.

Yes. The com.vu zone is signed with its own key, separately from the zone above it, and its own DS record is published in the parent, so validating resolvers can follow the chain. The registrant side is set out in detail in the rules: generating the keys, producing the DS record and deciding how often to roll them are your responsibility or your DNS operator's; the DS record is among the fields that can be supplied at registration and updated later. A step-by-step key handover procedure covers changing the DNS operator of a signed name, so the name does not fall into a validation failure mid-migration. The whois output reports whether a name is signed in a field of its own.