What are the standard top-level domain names and who controls them?
The article How Web Servers Work discusses the concept of domain names. “Howstuffworks.com” is a domain name. The com portion of the name is called the top-level domain name. There is a very small set of generic top-level domain names, which you will probably recognize: • com – for commercial endeavors • org – for non-profit organizations • net – for network providers • mil – for military organizations • gov – for government organizations • edu – for educational organizations • info – for entities providing information services There are also a number of top-level domain names for individual countries, including countries like Canada (ca), Australia (au) and the United Kingdom (uk). IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Association, provides world-wide management of the top-level domain names. See the next page for more information and related links.
