Enter Vanuatu market with a .VU Domain

No. Nowhere in the regulator's rules is there a requirement to be established in Vanuatu, to show a local address, to appoint a local representative or to file documents; all five published policy papers point the same way. A company based in Türkiye and an organisation anywhere else register on identical terms, and the policy goes further by making it a principle that registrars should be neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by sitting inside or outside Vanuatu. Priority is purely chronological: if the name is free it goes to whoever applies first, and there is no reservation procedure or waiting list. Registration runs through an accredited registrar; the registry takes no applications directly.

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 itself may supply it. The UDAI expires after a set period for security reasons, so do not sit on it once you have it. Two more clauses work in your favour: neither the releasing registrar nor the registry may charge a transfer fee, and the register changes immediately once the gaining registrar submits the transaction. No transfer is possible during the five-day grace period right after registration. Start on the domain transfer page.

In this zone 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 you 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.

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, justified on the ground that people may need to reach the holder about the name. In lookups the holder name, organisation, address, telephone and email all appeared in the clear — the automatic redaction you know from generic extensions does not exist here. If you want your personal details off the record you have to take the privacy service your registrar offers; it works in .vu, and records held that way show a proxy organisation instead. Check how your own record looks on the whois search page.

Both sit with the same registry under the same rulebook; the difference is the level. .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. The point that matters commercially: moderation is prescribed only for gov.vu and edu.vu, so .com.vu asks for no declaration of commercial capacity and no approval wait. Nor is there any link of right between the levels — holding foo.vu does not reserve foo.com.vu for you, and the reverse is equally true. If you want to close your name in the Vanuatu market, taking both is the direct route.

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. So the fast administrative procedure you know 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, this means a trademark complaint here starts with legal advice, not with a filing form.

No. The rules close the character set explicitly: only lower-case letters a to z, the digits 0 to 9 and the hyphen are permitted, which leaves accented and non-Latin letters out entirely. The same clause shuts a second door by forbidding hyphens in the third and fourth positions together — precisely where the encoded prefix used by internationalised names sits. A name may not begin or end with a hyphen either. Organisations in the operating chain have carried the same notice for years: the registry does not support internationalised names. You need to build your name from its ASCII equivalent.

Yes. The zone is signed: a DS record for .vu is published in the root, and validating resolvers mark the answers as authenticated. The registrant side is set out in detail in the rules as well. 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 can be updated later. There is also a step-by-step key handover procedure for 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.