.edu

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**.edu**

Introduced	1985
TLD type	Generic top-level domain
Status	Active
Registry	Educause
Sponsoring organization	Not technically sponsored, but Educause is a nonprofit organization
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.
Web site	.edu Home Page

.edu (education) is the generic top-level domain for educational institutions, primarily those in the United States.

[edit] History

Created in January 1985 as one of the first top-level domains, .edu was originally intended for educational institutions anywhere in the world. With few exceptions, however, only those in the United States registered such domains, while educational institutions in other countries usually used domain names under the appropriate country code TLD. In some countries a second-level domain is used to indicate an educational institutions (e.g. .edu.mx in Mexico, .edu.au in Australia, .ac.uk and .sch.uk in the United Kingdom) and in others only the country code is used (e.g. in Canada and Germany). In Germany, the second-level domain has a prefix indicating the kind of institution (uni for Universität, fh for Fachhochschule, for instance www.uni-erfurt.de and www.fh-erfurt.de) or, if there several institutions of the same type, the abbreviation of the institutions name (for instance www.fu-berlin.de, www.tu-berlin.de and www.hu-berlin.de for the three Berlin universities).

An example of a non-US .edu domain is the French polytechnique.edu, the Belgian solvay.edu, the Swedish korteboskolan.edu or the Indian nist.edu.

[edit] Accreditation

Under the present system, only post-secondary institutions 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. 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.

Note that the current eligibility requirements apply only to new applicants. Several non-qualifying institutions retain their .edu domains obtained before the current rules came into force. Examples of these include Montgomery Blair High School, a public secondary school at mbhs.edu, and the University of the West Indies, an international university, at uwi.edu. Other non-post-secondary institutions with .edu domains include Phillips Exeter Academy, a private secondary school at www.exeter.edu; Phillips Academy Andover, a private secondary school at www.andover.edu; the Brookings Institution, a research and policy institute at www.brook.edu; the Smithsonian Institution, a national museum ("America's national educational facility") at www.si.edu; the J. Paul Getty Trust, an international cultural and philanthropic organization in Los Angeles, California at www.getty.edu; Educause, "a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology" at www.educause.edu; the Franklin Institute Science Museum, a museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at www.fi.edu; the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco, California, at www.exploratorium.edu; the Institutes of Medicine, an academy associated with the National Academy of Sciences, at www.iom.edu; the Art Institute of Chicago, an art museum at www.artic.edu; the Folger Shakespeare Library, a library in Washington, D.C., at www.folger.edu; and the Space Telescope Science Institute, the organization that selects the science program for the Hubble Space Telescope, at www.stsci.edu.

The restriction to post-secondary institutions does not apply to the corresponding domains in some other countries. For example, the British .ac.uk second-level domain is also used by Further Education colleges, museums, learned societies and UCAS.

[edit] External links

.edu Home Page
.edu Domain Space (U.S. Department of Commerce)
IANA .edu whois information
RFC 920 defined .edu and the other original top-level domains.
Database for Accreditation in the United States (CHEA)
Database for Accreditation in the United States (USDE)

Generic top-level domains

Unsponsored	.biz .com .edu .gov .info .int .mil .name .net .org
Sponsored	.aero .cat .coop .jobs .mobi .museum .pro .travel
Infrastructure	.arpa .root
Startup phase	.asia .tel
Proposed	.cym .geo .kid .kids .mail .post .sco .web .xxx
Deleted/retired	.nato
Reserved	.example .invalid .localhost .test
Pseudo-domains	.bitnet .csnet .local .onion .uucp
Unofficial	see Alternative DNS roots

See also: Country code top-level domains