I am looking to buy some country level variations on a domain name I have, say french, italian, spanish (mainly european ones). Where do you recommend I do this? The only place I know about is register.com and I am certainly not keen on using them. Any other suggestions? I know I will pay a premium for doing this but the ease of having them all registered at once is worth it.

If you click on the link below you can see all the country domain names if you click on the country you are interested it will give you the contact info for technical/buying etc.

http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm

Thanks, will check that out.

I found netnames which was quite useful; didn't realise how restricitve a lot of countries polices are, compared to .com or .co.uk names that I have dealt with before.

Most other countries the government actually owns the utilities like telephone, electricity companies etc. ISP/domains are also owned by the government monopolies so that makes it a big pain and very bureaucratic to buy domains etc.

Not really, at least not in Europe.

That is the case in Latin America and in Russia which is what this thread was about .ru domains. Europe began deregulating their telecom industries in the mid 80's. Before that they were state-owned. liberalization is a good thing in my opinion. It allows for competitive pricing since their isn't monopoly anymore and the efficiency improves greatly. In Costa Rica where I'm from originally you can wait months and even years for a new phone line. In the US its done over the phone in minutes. I don't know about the whole of Europe but I'm sure a few European countries government still own their telecommunication and utilities services or they allow a private company to manage and sell domains but the government is still the owner. Not sure which ones though.

----Never mind about the .ru that was another thread! They're all starting to blend together. Time for a couple day rest from the forum! :D

This is not different to the US, where Network Solutions is still a state sanctioned monopoly. All domain name systems are based on a monopoly who runs the system be it the US, UK or anywhere else.

The issue I am finding for european names is how restrictive the policies are, ie you have to live x,y,z or have your company named the exact domain you want (so product domains are out) etc.