Registering a domain in Brazil

Registro.br is the only accredited registrar of .br domains.
They keep public statistics about domains, updated daily. In January 2004, there were about 540,000 domains, of which about 490,000 (91%) were commercial (.com.br).
Besides the usual .com.br, .org.br, .net.br, there are several other second level domains in Brazil, grouped in four classes: entities, universities, persons and professionals. Entities include, among others, agricultural (.agr.br), cooperatives (.coop.br), sports (esp.br), etc; universities used to be .edu.br, but now most (and all new) are just .br; personal domains are like name1.name2.nom.br; professionals have especific second levels, like eng.br (engineers), adv.br (lawyers), med.br (doctors), etc.
Cost of domain is R$ 30 per year (2003); domains must be renewed yearly.
For further official information about domains, check out the info and FAQ pages of registro.br (Portuguese only).

Registering a domain in Brazil
Register a domain in Brazil is bureaucratic, at least when compared to registering a .com domain.
Firstly, notice that the level of bureaucracy depends on the top level domains: registering a mil.br requires a military authorization, registering an eng.br requires proof of being an engineer, etc.
To register a .com.br, the basic steps are:
- create an account with registro.br;
- provide the information required about the contact persons;
- provide the Tax Number (CNPJ) of the company to which the domain is associated; it is assumed that a .com.br will have commercial purposes, so it must be associated to a company, so a tax number must be provided. Tax Numbers are issued by the Brazilian Revenue Agency, following a much more bureaucratic process; likewise, personal domains require a personal tax number (CPF).
- provide the addresses of two DNS servers; the servers must be configured before you try to register the domain (a DNS query is done during the registration process); in comparison, a .com may be registered before you have hosting set up.
- if all above steps are OK, the domain is made public in a matter of hours; a message is sent with a link to an invoice; the invoice must be paid in a bank in Brazil, and the domain will be valid for one year.

Restricted domains
There are some restricted domain names.
- Some names are reserved by the bureaucrats; internet.com.br is an example.
- Dirty words can't be registered; this is not disclosed, but possibly there is a dictionary with all such names.
- Domains like name1-name2.com.br may only be registered by the owner of name1name2.com.br
- Names registered in the copyright protection agency can only be registered by the owner
- Expired domains follow an specific process (see below)
- Other minor restrictions apply (e.g.: .com.br and ind.br can't be registered by the same person/entity)

Expired domains
When a domain in not renewed, it is not automatically made available for registration; instead, a liberation process must be followed.
From time to time, at discretion of registro.br, a liberation process is started. There was one of such process during Jan 3 through Jan 18, 2004; the list of available domains for such process is here. The domain names available are 1)those which have expired since the last liberation process and 2)those which were not registered during the previous process because more than one person tried to register it.
The rules are very basic:
- if only one person tries to register an expired domain, the person gets the domain.
- if two or more persons try to register an expired domain, none gets the domain; the domain name must await for the next liberation process, when the rules are applied again.
A few peculiarities about the process: - the DNS doesn't have to be configured when you apply to register the domain; after the registration is confirmed, there is a 14 day period to configure the hosting
- while only one person is applying to a domain, only said person will know it; when the second person applies to the same domain, it is made public that the domain is already under dispute
- as a consequence of the process, some domain names are very likely to be disputed, and will probably never see a real site; some examples are modelos.com.br (models), cerveja.com.br (beer), dvds.com.br

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