Archive · 2019 · From the print edition of Friday 4 October 2019, Vol. 27, No. 8,315
BusinessAttelkom lets .ir.ad lapse: "nobody was using it"
Every address in Irad's country domain stopped working this week. Attelkom says the zone had been empty for years.
TALAS — Every website and email address ending in .ir.ad stopped working this week after Attelkom let the registration of the zone lapse, the company confirmed yesterday. "Nobody was using it," a spokesman said.
The zone, which depended on an arrangement with the registry of Andorra, was opened in the 1990s and required an ISEZ business or residence document to register a name. Independent outlets began leaving it after 2008, when Attelkom suspended names on the instructions of the Department of Public Information. In 2013 and 2014 an Attelkom reseller sold thousands of names to foreign spammers without the document check, and in 2015 search engines demoted the whole zone. Attelkom stopped issuing new names in 2017.
The spokesman said fewer than 300 names were still registered, most of them unused, and that customers had been told two years ago to move to generic domains. Andorra's registry did not respond to a request for comment.
The old addresses will live on for a while on shop signs, business cards and the sides of minibuses. "Our sign says .ir.ad," said the owner of a print shop near the Central Bazaar. "I will change it when it falls down."