.edu

edu

Introduced	1985
TLD type	Sponsored top-level domain
Status	Active
Registry	Educause (operated by VeriSign)
Sponsor	Educause
Intended use	Educational institutions
Actual use	Accredited post-secondary institutions, almost entirely within the United States of America
Registration restrictions	Must be accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of Nationally recognized accrediting agencies. Some older registrations are grandfathered.
Structure	Registrations at second level permitted
Documents	RFC 920; RFC 1591; US Department of Commerce agreement
Dispute policies	Educause may revoke registrations if policy provisions are violated.
Website	edu Home Page

The domain name edu is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from education, indicating its intended use as a name space for educational institutions, primarily those in the United States.^[1] Although not officially mandated for much of the domain's existence, in practice it has been used primarily for U.S.-based four-year universities. Starting in 2001, it was officially restricted to accredited post-secondary institutions and organizations that are accredited by nationally recognized accrediting agencies.

History

Created in January 1985 as one of the first top-level domains^[2] (the other five being com, gov, mil, net and org). edu was originally intended for educational institutions anywhere in the world.

On April 24, 1985 cmu.edu, berkeley.edu, Columbia.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, and ucla.edu became the first six registered domain names.

The edu domain was predominantly used by educational institutions in the United States, while institutions in other countries usually used domain names under the appropriate country code TLD. However, many institution outside the United States have maintained the use of their edu affiliation.

Accreditation

Starting on October 29, 2001, only post-secondary institutions and organizations that are accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies are eligible to apply for a edu domain.^[3] Most such agencies accredit only US institutions, so very few non-US institutions qualify, and edu remains almost exclusively a top-level domain of the United States.

As the domain was traditionally used for four-year universities, the new policy also allowed two-year colleges, which had previously used other domains, to register. Many organizations took advantage of this and officially switched to edu domains. A notable case was the California Community Colleges System, whose members had previously masked their domains with .org or .net but were officially located at vestigial hierarchical domains such as sjdccd.cc.ca.us (representing San Joaquin Delta Community College District). This then became simply deltacollege.edu.

The current eligibility requirements apply only to new applicants. Numerous other institutions retain edu domain delegations that were obtained before the current rules came into force, including K-12 public school districts, individual public and private K-12 schools in the United States, universities and schools located outside the United States, as well as unaccredited institutions.

Other uses

A few of the existing edu domain registrants are not schools; often these are established museums or have some connection to education and research, others are simply protected due to a grandfathering clause of pre-2000 registrations (even though some never qualified under the registration requirements of the time).

Registry

Educause is the authoritative registry provider for edu, and is also its exclusive registrar as edu is a closed system. The applying institution must apply directly to Educause and show proof of their accreditation, and only then will they be given a domain name. While Educause is a non-profit agency, it does charge an annual fee for each domain name. All of the money that is made from these fees goes into the costs of maintaining the infrastructure for edu. Educause, as the sole registrar, resolves domain name disputes and all other policy matters for edu. Ultimate authority for edu rests with the US Department of Commerce. As far as the actual technical administration, Educause directly runs and maintains the technical components for the registrar and registration portion of the operation in-house, but they contract out the operation of the registry nameservers for the domain, currently, to VeriSign's Registry hosting services.

Practices outside the US

Many countries have implemented special subdomains within their designated country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the use by educational entities. These domains have varying eligibility requirements. In some countries, the edu second-level domain is an ordinary domain with no special significance; in others it has been issued to a local departments of education or has been deliberately reserved and not issued to anyone to prevent confusion.

In some countries a second-level domain is used to indicate an educational institutions (e.g., edu.mx in Mexico, edu.cn in China, edu.au in Australia, ac.uk and sch.uk and ed.uk in the United Kingdom) and in others only the country code is used (e.g., in Canada, Germany and France). In Germany, the second-level domain often has a prefix indicating the kind of institution (uni for Universität, fh for Fachhochschule, for instance uni-erfurt.de and fh-erfurt.de) or, if there are several institutions of the same type, the abbreviation of the institutions name (for instance fu-berlin.de, tu-berlin.de and hu-berlin.de for the three Berlin universities).

See also

• Generic top-level domain

References

External links

• .edu Home Page