.nu is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the island state of Niue. It was one of the first ccTLDs to be marketed to the Internet at large as an alternative to the gTLDs .com, .net, and .org. Playing on the phonetic similarity between nu and new, it was promoted as a "new" TLD in which there was an abundance of good domain names available. However now most of the top .nu's have been taken.
The domain is particularly popular in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, as nu is the word for "now" in Swedish, Danish and Dutch. Partially owing to restrictive domain rules for the ccTLD assigned to Sweden, .se, .nu was used for creative marketing of websites such as www.TV.nu. However, the .se domain was generally considered more professional than .nu and .com. Registrations of Internationalized domain names and Unicode special characters are also allowed.
