Public Registration for Second-Level and Lower Domains

The IANA is in charge of deciding which TLDs exist in the Internet name space, and as such, they are ultimately responsible for all names in the Internet. The entire point of the authority hierarchy, however, is that IANA should not be responsible for the whole name space. So, while IANA maintains control over certain TLDs, such as .INT and .ARPA, control for managing the others is delegated to secondary authorities for each TLD.

Just as IANA had the choice of how to delegate authority to the subdomains of the root domain, the organization in charge of each TLD gets to make the same decision about how second-level domains are to be created under the TLD.

In many TLDs, especially the generic ...

Get TCP/IP Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.