South American domains: Chile (.cl)

Registration:

To register your Chilian domain, click here!

Once the domain is registered

All Chilian domain names registered with us are stored on our international server. Domains registered with us are automatically provided with their own under-construction page - this notifies potential registrants that the name has been acquired and is now registered. The under-construction page is offered free of charge and may be used indefinitely.

It is possible for Web and/or Mail forwarding to be provided for Chilian domains.

Domain transfer/release fees are charged are by a majority of registrars, but BB Online make no charge to transfer a domain to another Chilian domain name registrar.

Background

Since 1986, the Department of Computer Science of the University of Chile has been in charge of handling domain name registrations under the ".cl" top-level domain. It was initially activated for UUCP mail. For nearly a decade, the handling process of domain name applications ran on a very informal basis, with no written rules, and also no conflicts.

NIC is an acronym for Network Information Center, it is a historic name used throughout the world to define the organization responsible for administering the domain names in one category on the Internet. The organization administering the Internet domain names, IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority), delegated the exercise of that function to the Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, to allow the creation of domain names under the suffix ".cl".

In 2006 an Accountability Framework Agreement was signed between Chile and IAS ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), this agreement formalizes the relationship between ICANN and NIC Chile. It contains the responsibilities both comapnies have regarding the preservation of the stability, security and interoperability of the Internet. Since its founding in 1998, ICANN have the power to establish such agreements with operators of registerys for ccTLD's. (domain names of countries). However this was only carried out recently so by signing this document, NIC Chile became the first Latin American country to establish formal relations with ICANN.

Registration of second-level domains under the ".cl" TLD is open to anyone. However, foreign registrants must provide a domestic contact with a RUT, the Chilean national identification number.

Registration of names including accented letters was opened up on September 21st 2005. Seven new characters can be used to register a NIC in Chile: á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú and ü. These characters are added to those already used: letters (a-z), digits (0-9) and dash (-).