.gov
 | |
| country: | United States |
| Registry Provider: | General Services Administration (GSA) |
| Date Implemented: | 1985 |
| Type: | sponsored top level domain (sTLD) |
| Community: | U.S. government entities |
More information: 
| |
.gov is one of the original top-level domain names (TLDs) that was implemented in the root zone of the internet Domain Name System (DNS). The domain is a short term for "government." It is restricted for the use of government agencies in the United States, therefore it is considered a sponsored top-level domain name (sTLD). The other TLDs introduced by Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds were .arpa .com, .edu, .net, .mil, and .org.[1] The General Services Administration (GSA), an independent agency responsible in supervising the businesses of the United States federal government serves as the administrator of .gov domain.[2]
Background
During the late 1980s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) delegated the .gov to the Federal Networking Council (FNC), a group chartered by the National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Computing, Information and Communications (CCIC) to provide a forum for networking collaborations among Federal agencies to meet their research, education, and operational mission goals.[3] On July 18, 1997, FNC granted the authority to administer and manage the operations of the .gov domain to GSA through the guidance of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). [4] [5]