.edu (education) is the generic top-level domain for educational institutions, primarily those in the United States[EDUcause: Eligibility for the .edu Domain].
History
Created in January 1985 as one of the first top-level domains, .edu was originally intended for educational institutions anywhere in the world. On April 24, 1985 columbia.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, and ucla.edu became the first four registered domain names. With few exceptions, however, only educational institutions in the United States registered such domains, while 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, .ac.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 www.uni-erfurt.de and www.fh-erfurt.de) or, if there are 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).
Examples of non-US .edu domain is the French polytechnique.edu, the Belgian solvay.edu, the Canadian marianopolis.edu, the Swedish korteboskolan.edu, the Catalan public university upc.edu, Kosovo uni-pr.edu, the Indian nist.edu or the Thai au.edu. Many institutions whose primary sites are located in local second-level domains run mirror sites in the .edu domain, such as oxford.edu mirroring ox.ac.uk, or monash.edu mirroring monash.edu.au.
Accreditation
Starting on October 29, 2001, 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.["Eligibility for the .edu Domain FAQ", EduCause.edu, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-05-11. ] 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 Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a public secondary school at tjhsst.edu; the Hudson City School District, at hudson.edu; the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, at imsa.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 exeter.edu; Montgomery Blair High School, a public magnet high school in Montgomery County, MD at mbhs.edu; Phillips Academy Andover, a private secondary school at andover.edu; Westtown School, a private, Quaker secondary school at westtown.edu; and Porter-Gaud School, an Episcopal school in Charleston, SC at portergaud.edu.
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 to register under the registration requirements of the time):
Country-code second-level domains
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.
In some countries, .edu.xx is an ordinary domain with no special significance; in others it has been issued to a local Department of Education or has been deliberately reserved and not issued to anyone to prevent confusion. The use of .ac.xx or .edu.xx within individual ccTLD\'s does not follow one unified international standard.
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, 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.
References
External links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
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