The office of the Telecommunications Radiocommunications and Broadcasting Regulator (TRBR), the statutory body which regulates telecommunications, radio communications and broadcasting services in Vanuatu, recently announced that Neustar had taken over as the domain name Registry for Vanuatu’s .VU domain names. This in turn means that Neustar will provide domain name Registry and DNS services for the .VU namespace.
According to TRBR, this management change has been made in order to bring "further growth to the namespace through active promotion and increased retail competition".
Registrants of .VU domain names will not experience any changes to their domain names during the transition period and there will be no changes to the domain name rules, which allow for any individual or entity to register a .VU domain name.
More importantly, TRBR expects Neustar to make .VU the preferred "online identity for Vanuatu businesses and organisations". Especially as Neustar are expected to invest in a new DNS node in Vanuatu, which will in turn increase the resolution speeds for Vanuatu Internet users, as well as for global users who visit .VU websites.
These changes could also be an opportunity to market the .VU extension in the same way as other ccTLD Registries have done in order to capitalize on the meaning of the extension in other languages or as domain name “hacks”. The term “vu” means "saw" in French, rather like “nu”, the ccTLD of Niue (.NU) that is especially popular in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands since "nu" is Swedish, Danish and Dutch for "now", and it is also French for "nude". However it seems doubtful that .VU will replicate the success of neighbouring Tuvalu’s .TV extension, a term associated worldwide with broadcast media that earns the tiny island around 1/12th of its gross national income.
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