When the Internet was first created by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) the only domain extensions were .gov (for US government sites), .edu (for educational institutions), and .mil (for US military sites). When the Internet was opened up to commercial and other users in the late 1980’s the .com (for commercial sites), .org (for organization sites), and .net (for network related sites) were created. Additional information on these and other “generic” domains can be found here. As the Internet and the World Wide Web has spread around the planet, the “non-generic” two letter country domain extensions were added. (For example, the BBC world news site is news.bbc.co.uk where UK stands for United Kingdom).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 2:29 am and is filed under FAQ, domain registration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.