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Last Updated: June 12, 2007
A generic top-level domain (gTLD) is a
top-level domain (the far right portion of a domain name)
that is not a 2-letter country code. Instead, these are 3-letter
or more, and represent types of organizations. There are
currently 19 active gTLDs:
- .aero - for the air transport industry
- .biz - for business use
- .cat - for Catalan language/culture
- .com - for commercial organizations, but unrestricted
- .coop - for cooperatives
- .edu - for post-secondary educational establishments
- .gov - for governments and their agencies in the United States
- .info - for informational sites, but unrestricted
- .int - for international organizations established by treaty
- .jobs - for employment-related sites
- .mil - for the US military
- .mobi - for sites catering to mobile devices
- .museum - for museums
- .name - for families and individuals
- .net - originally for network infrastructures, now unrestricted
- .org - originally for organizations not clearly falling within the other gTLDs, now unrestricted
- .pro - for certain professions (currently $350/yr)
- .tel - for services involving connections between the telephone network and the Internet
- .travel - for travel agents, airlines, hoteliers, tourism bureaus, etc.
The following gTLDs are in the process of being approved, and
may be added to the root nameservers in the near future:
- .asia
- for the Asian community
- .post - for postal services
- .geo - for geographically related sites
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"What
about .mac?" you ask...
There is no such domain. It's
simply a marketing name, not an actual gTLD. In 2002, Apple Computer
refers to its online subscription service at mac.com as "dot-mac" and
often written as ".mac" It's similar to how Microsoft
in the late 1990s named its
software development platform dotnet framework, or .net for
short. It is for local executables, not a web-based platform
(i.e. Silverlight, Flash); and certainly no relation to the
.net
gTLD. |
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ALSO:
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