RFC 1480 (rfc1480) - Page 3 of 47

The US Domain

RFC 1480                     The US Domain                     June 1993


   had to wait for the NIC to make changes in HOSTS.TXT to make the
   changes visible to the Internet at large.  Organizations also wanted
   some local structure on the name space.  The applications on the
   Internet were getting more sophisticated and creating a need for
   general purpose name service.  The idea of a hierarchical name space,
   with the hierarchy roughly corresponding to organizational structure,
   and names using "." as the character to mark the boundary between
   hierarchy levels was developed.  A design using a distributed
   database and generalized resources was implemented.

   The DNS provides standard formats for resource data, standard methods
   for querying the database, and standard methods for name servers to
   refresh local data from other name servers.

   1.2  Top-Level Domains

   The top-level domains in the DNS are EDU, COM, GOV, MIL, ORG, INT,
   and NET, and all the 2-letter country codes from the list of
   countries in ISO-3166.  The establishment of new top-level domains is
   managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).  The IANA
   may be contacted at .

   Even though the original intention was that any educational
   institution anywhere in the world could be registered under the EDU
   domain, in practice, it has turned out with few exceptions, only
   those in the United States have registered under EDU, similarly with
   COM (for commercial). In other countries, everything is registered
   under the 2-letter country code, often with some subdivision.  For
   example, in Korea (KR) the second level names are AC for academic
   community, CO for commercial, GO for government, and RE for research.
   However, each country may go its own way about organizing its domain,
   and many have.

   There are no current plans of putting all of the organizational
   domains EDU, GOV, COM, etc., under US.  These name tokens are not
   used in the US Domain to avoid confusion.

   Currently, only four year colleges and universities are being
   registered in the EDU domain.  All other schools are being registered
   in the US Domain.

   There are also concerns about the size of the other top-level domains
   (especially COM) and ideas are being considered for restructuring.

   Other names sometimes appear as top-level domain names.  Some people
   have made up names in the DNS-style without coordinating or
   registering  with the DNS management.  Some names that typically
   appear are BITNET, UUCP, and two-letter codes for continents, such as



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