Venkat Koduru’s Blog

I’ve always found it strange that the .gov top-level domain is managed and used solely by the United States government. Other countries have governments too, and the name “.gov” suggests nothing about United States sovereignty. Plus, there’s a “.us” TLD (top-level domain), so why can’t the United States use that domain for government websites? It seems unfair that the Internet which is meant to be an open, equal channel of communication allows one government such control.  Other countries use a descriptive domain under their country-code domain to designate government related websites (like .gov.uk, for example, where .uk is the country-code domain and .gov.uk is the descriptive subdomain), but not the U.S.  I decided to do some research, and it turns out this oddity is largely a result of the history of the Internet and domains.

First, here is a quick overview of who can/can’t use the .gov domain (paraphrased from gsa.gov):

Who Can Use It

• agencies, departments, programs, and commissions run by the U.S. federal government
• federally recognized Indian tribes
• state and local governments represented by an elected body of officials (Note: State/Local governments were not allowed to use .gov until 2003; Initially .gov was reserved only for the U.S. federal government)

Who Can’t Use It

• international organizations
• private organizations or commercial firms
• military entities (they use .mil instead)
• local government programs (while the local government itself can have a .gov domain, local government programs cannot)
• local governments not represented by an elected body of officials

If you’re interested, there are more details on who can/cannot register a .gov domain, here. But otherwise, let’s move on to the more important question: Why is .gov controlled by the United States government and why can’t other countries use this top-level domain?

A look at the IANA website (iana.org) reveals that the .gov domain was established on January 1st 1985.  It turns out January 1st 1985 is also the date that the popular .com, .net, and .org domains were established. .us, the first county-specific domain ever created was formalized on February 15th of that same year, about a month after the .gov domain. This means .gov was one of the first top-level domains to be created, and was established even before the existence of a single country-specific domain. On January 1st 1985, it would have been impossible to have a domain such as .gov.us because there was no “.us”.

But this only begs more questions: A) Why the United States? Why couldn’t the .gov domain be controlled by Canada, or England, or some other country? and B) Why couldn’t the United States government wait a month and use their .us domain for government websites, instead of having the .gov extension just for themselves?

A brief overview of IANA, followed by a quick glance at the history of the Internet as it pertains to IANA and domains will help to answer these questions.

IANA is an acronym for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. This sounds confusing, but just remember the name “IANA”. You’ll learn more about them soon. Most important to our discussion is IANA’s role in managing top-level domains. A top level domain is something like .gov, .com, .net, .org, .us, or .tv. IANA does not manage the top-level domain itself; in other words, IANA does not actually manage the .gov domain or the .com domain. Each top-level domain is managed by different organizations. .gov is managed by the General Services Administration, an agency of the United States federal government, while .com and .net are managed by VeriSign, a for-profit corporation that trades on the NADSAQ.

IANA’s role in managing top-level domains is to administer the data stored on a set of computers known as “root nameservers”.  Please bear with me. I know this can be confusing. These “root nameservers” store a list of top-level domains, such as .gov, .com, .org, and .net. Though these “root nameservers” themselves are not managed by IANA, the list of top-level domains stored on each of these computers is managed by the IANA. So just for clarification, I’ll say it one more time: the IANA manages the list of top-level domains (such as .gov and .com) and this list is stored on a bunch of computers known as “root nameservers”. If you wanted a new top-level domain (say .jake), the IANA would have to add “.jake” to the “root nameserver” list.

Now let us look at how the IANA was founded and its role in the Internet. Today the IANA is managed by ICANN through a contract to the United States Department of Commerce. Though ICANN is a non-profit organization, the IANA maintains strong ties to the U.S. government. But these ties were even stronger in the past, during the time that the .gov domain was established. As we go through IANA’s history, let’s keep in the mind the date – January 1st 1985 – that the .gov domain was established.

Initially, there were only a few computers connected with each other through ARPANET (the predecessor to today’s modern Internet). ARPANET was a project created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the U.S. Defense Department. So many of these early computers connected to ARPANET  were Defense Department computers, combined with computers from American universities such as UC Berkeley and MIT. Each of these computers had a form of identification which allowed one computer to communicate with the others. As the number of computers connected to each other grew, a more structured, formal, efficient system was needed to identify each computer.

And so in 1972, the U.S. Defense Department created the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which was responsible for assigning unique numbers, known as IP addresses to each computer.  These IP addresses provided an efficient, systematic way to identify a computer connected to the Internet, just like a street address identifies a house. Here’s an example of an IP address used by Google: 74.125.95.147.

As the Internet expanded, these long numbers became difficult to remember. So in 1984, and 1985, respectively, the name server, and domain name server (DNS) were invented. Along with DNS came top-level domains (like .gov and .com). And guess who was put in charge of managing the “root nameserver” list, the list which contained these top-level domains? None other than the United States Defense Department’s IANA. The IANA was already managing IP addresses, the numerical identification of each computer, so it was only natural that they’d manage the “root nameserver” list, which helped to identify computers in an easier way.

As we discussed earlier, the top-level domain .gov was established on January 1st 1985. At this time the organization essential in managing top-level domains, the IANA, was controlled by the U.S. government. ICANN, the non-profit that manages the IANA today, was formed later, in 1998. Further, ICANN’s authority to manage IANA become effective even later, on January 1st 1999. So, the United States government, which controlled ICANN in 1985 and had a significant influence on the internet, could create a “.gov” TLD [just] for themselves.  And why not create a TLD for youself if you could?  As we have seen, the U.S. government was instrumental in the formation of the Internet and top-level domains. Having spent so much time, money, and effort helping to develop the early Internet systems, it can hardly be described as selfish to desire your own piece of the top-level domain pie.

Of course, one could argue, and perhaps rightly so, that “.gov” should be opened up for use by other countries, but at least now we can understand the history behind why the United States government enjoys exclusive control over the “.gov” top-level domain. I sincerely hope that this blog post has helped fulfill your curiosity for this question – “Why is .gov controlled by the United States government?” -  for which Wikipedia’s information (at least at the time of this writing) was scarce.