RFC 920 (rfc920) - Page 2 of 14

Domain requirements

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RFC 920                                                     October 1984
Domain Requirements


General Purpose Domains

   While the initial domain name "ARPA" arises from the history of the
   development of this system and environment, in the future most of the
   top level names will be very general categories like "government",
   "education", or "commercial".  The motivation is to provide an
   organization name that is free of undesirable semantics.

   After a short period of initial experimentation, all current
   ARPA-Internet hosts will select some domain other than ARPA for their
   future use.  The use of ARPA as a top level domain will eventually
   cease.

Initial Set of Top Level Domains

   The initial top level domain names are:

      Temporary

         ARPA  =  The current ARPA-Internet hosts.

      Categories

         GOV  =  Government, any government related domains meeting the
                 second level requirements.

         EDU  =  Education, any education related domains meeting the
                 second level requirements.

         COM  =  Commercial, any commercial related domains meeting the
                 second level requirements.

         MIL  =  Military, any military related domains meeting the
                 second level requirements.

         ORG  =  Organization, any other domains meeting the second
                 level requirements.

      Countries

         The English two letter code (alpha-2) identifying a country
         according the the ISO Standard for "Codes for the
         Representation of Names of Countries" [5].






Postel & Reynolds

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