Roughly one year after .AR domains stopped being free, registered domains for this extension have fallen below 500,000.
In September 2013, .AR domains hit their all-time peak with more than 2.6 million registered domains. Back then, .com.ar registration was still free, and a huge number of domains were being registered purely for speculation. Gustavo Justich, then director of NIC Argentina, put it this way: “In Argentina domain registration is free, and this creates, on one hand, greater penetration of the .ar extension; on the other hand, cybersquatters emerge. There are people who have registered more than 65,000 domains on our platform. We have managed to recover thousands of domains through NIC Argentina, but there are still people holding large numbers of domains. We are working to change this situation.”
To address this problem and align with standard practices in other countries, NIC Argentina started charging for .COM.AR domain registration. One year in, the number of registered .COM.AR domains has dropped sharply. Around 450,000 .COM.AR domains remain registered, according to DomainTools.
This number will likely keep shrinking in the coming months as domains registered for free and never renewed under the paid model are purged from the system. Once that process wraps up, registrations should start growing again, following the upward trend seen across the rest of Latin America.
