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It’s well known that most top level domains set requirements for their subscriber, even if there’s several registrars.

For example, registrants of .eu domains must reside in the European Union. .fr must only contains ascii characters (no xn--).

But more generally, are there still others restrictions on the use of the .com domain name or is it possible to do everything as long as the registrar allows it ?

user2284570
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    That "commercial" restriction was lifted about 20 years ago. – Sven Oct 21 '16 at 19:07
  • @Osvaldo : this was in reply to Sven which simply told I should talk to the registrar. Typically registrars have their own restrictions in additions to the ones enforced by the entity managing the tld (such as Versign for .com and afnic for.fr) – user2284570 Oct 23 '16 at 12:41
  • Why did you rollback my edit? – unor Oct 23 '16 at 12:44
  • @unor : just to use ascii characters instead of small caps for acronyms. – user2284570 Oct 23 '16 at 12:46
  • @user2284570: These were not small caps, just normal capital letters. The term is "ASCII", not "ascii" (see Wikipedia). Same with TLD. And I changed more than that, too (e.g., you were missing space characters). – unor Oct 23 '16 at 12:49

2 Answers2

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There are very few restrictions on registering .com domains. 101domain.com has a page listing them. The only restrictions are:

Violating rights of third parties, illegal activities including viruses and hacking tools, obscene and abusive materials, and any names contrary to the government of the United States.

...

Domain Names must:

  • have minimum of 3 and a maximum of 63 characters;
  • begin with a letter or a number and end with a letter or a number;
  • use the English character set and may contain letters (i.e. , a-z, A-Z), numbers (i.e. 0-9) and dashes (-) or a combination of these;
  • neither begin with, nor end with a dash;
  • not contain a dash in the third and fourth positions (e.g. www.ab--cd.com); and
  • not include a space (e.g. www.ab cd.com).
Stephen Ostermiller
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  • So if a tiny percent of the pages on the target domain can be considered as porn (under us law), does it means the website is violating.comregistration rules ? Are you sure those rules apply to all registrars over the world for the.comdomain or are they just specific to101domain.com? – user2284570 Oct 26 '16 at 20:44
  • Not all porn is obscene. The requirement against obscenity has generally been for the name itself. See: The War Over Obscene Web Names Is On – Stephen Ostermiller Oct 26 '16 at 20:46
  • I was thinking about Facebook being forced to remove « Les origines du monde » A Painting from a famous french artists in the 19th century because it was obscene under us laws (depsite having been post by a french citirzen who never went to the united states). Are you sure it only applies to the domain name itself ? Also does those conditions applies to all registrars all over the world for the.comdomain names or just for us based registrars. – user2284570 Oct 26 '16 at 20:49
  • That was a French court under French law and Facebook was sued for removing it: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/french-art-lovers-sue-facebook-426308 It has nothing to do with their domain registration. – Stephen Ostermiller Oct 26 '16 at 20:53
  • Facebook was only sued in France were such painting does not cause legal problems. Though, I recognize the reason was Facebook is a us based company. Also you’re talking about only us based registrars. This doesn’t tell if it’s VeriSign who enforce that restriction on all registrars or just because the registrars are tied to jurisdiction were obscene materials are forbidden. *I don’t see any case enforced by VeriSign on a registrar serving the.comdomain.* http://dailyrevolution.org/tuesday/obscenenet.html seems to be for a.co.ukdomain – user2284570 Oct 26 '16 at 21:09
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The .com TLD is very popular. You don't have to be a business to register a .com domain name. As you already noted, there are restrictions for domain names with a country TLD.

Host Lawn
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  • Yes, but not only countries tld. Are there other restrictions about contents of.comdomains ? – user2284570 Oct 23 '16 at 18:35
  • As this answer says, you no longer have to be a business to register a .com. Anybody can register a .com domain now. – Stephen Ostermiller Oct 24 '16 at 10:16
  • @StephenOstermiller : but I’m asking if there’re other restrictions such as what the domain name can contain (for example, the encoded version of the € symbol is disallowed for.frdomain) – user2284570 Oct 26 '16 at 18:49