.it

Status:	Active
country:	Italy
Manager:	Registro.it
Registrations:	2,500,991 (Jan 2013)
Date Implemented:	December, 1987
Type:	ccTLD
More information:

.it is the ccTLD for Italy. It is managed by Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT - CNR), which is part of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council).

Rules and Restrictions

The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to adults who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican City State, the Republic of San Marino, the Swiss Confederation and in the United Kingdom.

Second-level Domains

• .edu.it: for Italian schools of all types and levels, public and scuola paritaria (officially accredited by the Italian state);
• .gov.it: the registration of a domain name in the SLD gov.it is allowed only to the Central State Public Administrations and to the National Social Security and Welfare Institutions.

Characters

The minimum length for .it domain names is 3 characters (e.g.: cnr.it). The maximum length is 63 characters (e.g.: iit.cnr.it).

All the numbers (0-9), letters (a-z) (ASCII), the hyphen (-) an all the characters NON-ASCII which belong to the charset indicated in the “Technical Guideline”. A domain name cannot begin or end with a hyphen (-); and the first four characters cannot be the sequence "xn--", which is reserved for the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) code of a domain name.

IDNs

Beginning in July 11, 2012, all .it domain names began allowing Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), allowing them to support Italian, French, and German accents and characters. In 2015, the list of acceptable characters grew to include the languages of all nations in the European Union.

Usage

The first .it domain was established in December 1987; the domain for the National Research Council.

The potential for domain hacking the English article "it" has proven popular for large corporations with a presence in the EEA.

Adoption of .it names has not been consistent throughout Italy. Registro.it reported in 2011 that .it domain names were mainly registered in certain regions of Italy, while there was an extremely low registration rates in the southern region.

Country code top-level domain

Second Level Domain

Internationalized Domain Name