.gov

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.gov is a generic top-level domain (gTLD), its name from the term government ( government derives). It was introduced on January 1, 1985 , making it one of the oldest addresses ever.

use

Use of .gov is reserved for United States government agencies only and is monitored by the General Services Administration , located in Fairfax, Virginia . VeriSign has been responsible for technical operations since December 2010 and also looks after .com and .net . The fee for a .gov domain is $ 125 annually. The USA is the only country that has an additional TLD in addition to its country-specific ending .us . This is due to the fact that the Domain Name System and basically the Internet developed from the ARPANET , which was a project of the federal authorities. Individual organizations, such as the United States Department of Defense , use .mil instead of .gov.

In June 2011, Barack Obama became the first US President to request access to the registry's database. According to official information, the aim was to obtain information on all public administration websites and to reduce the number of offers for reducing bureaucracy .

safety

.Gov has been using the DNSSEC process since March 2009, which is intended to make it difficult to manipulate domains with the extension. The start was marked by problems: Among other things, the server that was supposed to validate the DNS certificates could not be reached. Operation normalized later, but in August 2013 various .gov domains could not be reached at all due to another problem. The registry named a program error as the reason .

According to a study by the security company McAfee , .gov is the safest generic top-level domain. The reasons for this are the strict allocation criteria and the fact that only very few domains were allocated.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Domain Delegation Data. IANA , accessed January 16, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Florian Hitzelberger: News from .bg, .kp and .gov. In: domain-right. January 18, 2011, accessed January 16, 2013 .
  3. ↑ Florian Hitzelberger: News from .hamburg, .xxx and .gov. In: domain-right. June 29, 2011, accessed February 13, 2013 (last paragraph).
  4. ↑ Monika Ermert: A bumpy start for DNS Security at .gov. In: Heise Online . March 9, 2009, accessed January 16, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Florian Hitzelberger: DNSSEC error in .gov led to failures. In: domain-right. August 23, 2013. Retrieved September 6, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Florian Hitzelberger: World map of the most dangerous TLDs. In: domain-right. March 23, 2007, accessed January 16, 2013 .