.gov

.gov is the generic top-level domain used by the United States federal government. It was one of the original top-level domains, established in January 1985.

The U.S. is the only country that has a government-specific top-level domain in addition to its ccTLD. Other countries typically use a second-level domain for this purpose, e.g., .gov.uk for the United Kingdom, .go.jp for Japan and .govt.nz for New Zealand. Since the United States controls the .gov Top Level Domain, it would be impossible for another country to create a domain ending in .gov, for example .jp.gov.

Many U.S. federal agencies still use .fed.us rather than .gov. The Department of Defense and its subsidiary organizations use .mil.

All governments in the U.S. are now allowed to use .gov, such as www.atlantaga.gov for the city of Atlanta, and www.georgia.gov for the U.S. state of Georgia.

External link

RFC 2146 (U.S. Government Internet Domain Names) (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2146.html)

Retrieved from "http://www.centipedia.com/articles/.gov"

This page has been accessed 301 times. This page was last modified 12:57, 11 Nov 2004. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).