.so domain: Somalia's ccTLD, rules and management

IANA's delegation record names Somalia's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications as the ccTLD manager, the policy authority responsible for the domain under the country's government. That record hasn't changed since 2016.

Day-to-day registry operation is where things get murky. Several registrars refer to SONIC (Somali Network Information Center) as the operator, and IANA's technical contact is listed as soNIC. Wikipedia claims Somalia's National Communications Authority (NCA) took full control of registry operations from SONIC and Cloudy Registry back in March 2018, but that change never made it into IANA's published delegation data. GoDaddy, meanwhile, names Hexonet (1API GmbH) as the back-end technical provider, with Nic.so as sponsor.

For a buyer, here's the distinction that actually matters: the registry is whichever body currently runs the .so database and sets policy under the ministry's authority (contested, as above); a registrar is the accredited company you actually buy the name from, such as Gandi or EuroDNS; and the registrant is you, the person or organisation whose contact details sit on the WHOIS record. The operator layer has changed hands more than once with no clean public paper trail to show for it, so check your chosen registrar's current terms yourself rather than trusting older third-party write-ups.

Whether you're actually allowed to register a .so domain depends entirely on who you ask, and that's worth sorting out before you hand over any money. Webnic, Rebel, NiceNIC, Namecheap and Web Solutions all say .so is open to anyone on the planet, no residency, no local presence, no documents to file.

Gandi and EuroDNS tell a different story: a "bona fide connection" policy, where registrants are expected to be institutions or residents of Somalia, or at least have some legitimate, provable tie to the country. Wikipedia's history page notes that a 2015 registry transfer brought in tighter restrictions on non-Somalia registrants, and a handful of registrars responded by freezing new registrations altogether.

So either the registry and registrar rules genuinely don't match up, or some registrars just haven't bothered updating their sign-up pages. What's consistent: names run 3 to 63 characters, alphanumeric plus hyphens (never leading or trailing), and Gandi notes there's no IDN support. Given how much the eligibility claims contradict each other, check the registrar's current terms yourself before assuming registration is wide open.

Registrars selling .so run the standard authorisation-code transfer process, the same one used across most top-level domains. Nothing in the sources we found confirms whether Somalia's registry actually follows the ICANN 60-day transfer-lock policy that binds gTLDs, so treat that as unconfirmed. Don't assume it applies just because it's common elsewhere.

Registration periods run from 1 to 10 years, with a minimum renewal increment of 1 year (Gandi, EuroDNS). Gandi's published pricing shows a first-year restore fee of $201.82 followed by normal renewal pricing, with a pending-delete window of 5 days once the restoration period ends. EuroDNS lists something different: a flat reactivation fee of €25.00 on top of the renewal price. Those two figures don't agree, which tells you these are registrar-level charges stacked on a registry base cost, not one published registry fee schedule everyone pulls from.

Here's what's missing entirely: there is no retrievable fee table or lifecycle policy straight from the Somalia registry itself (nic.so returned nothing usable for this research). Grace-period length and the exact point redemption kicks in are visible only through registrar marketing pages, and those pages contradict each other.