RFC 1480 (rfc1480) - Page 3 of 47
The US Domain
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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
Cooper & Postel