RFC 920 (rfc920) - Page 2 of 14
Domain requirements
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 920 October 1984
Domain Requirements
General Purpose Domains
While the initial domain name "ARPA" arises from the history of the
development of this system and environment, in the future most of the
top level names will be very general categories like "government",
"education", or "commercial". The motivation is to provide an
organization name that is free of undesirable semantics.
After a short period of initial experimentation, all current
ARPA-Internet hosts will select some domain other than ARPA for their
future use. The use of ARPA as a top level domain will eventually
cease.
Initial Set of Top Level Domains
The initial top level domain names are:
Temporary
ARPA = The current ARPA-Internet hosts.
Categories
GOV = Government, any government related domains meeting the
second level requirements.
EDU = Education, any education related domains meeting the
second level requirements.
COM = Commercial, any commercial related domains meeting the
second level requirements.
MIL = Military, any military related domains meeting the
second level requirements.
ORG = Organization, any other domains meeting the second
level requirements.
Countries
The English two letter code (alpha-2) identifying a country
according the the ISO Standard for "Codes for the
Representation of Names of Countries" [5].
Postel & Reynolds