.edu
| Introduced | January 1, 1985 |
|---|---|
| TLD type | Sponsored top-level domain |
| Status | Active |
| Registry | Educause (operated by VeriSign) |
| Intended use | Educational institutions |
| Structure | Registrations at second level permitted |
| Documents | RFC 920; RFC 1591 |
| Website | edu Home Page |
| DNSSEC | yes |
The domain name edu is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Since 2001, new registrants to the domain have been required to be United States-affiliated institutions of higher education; before then, registrants included non-U.S.-affiliated—and even non-educational—institutions, with some retaining their registrations to the present.
The .edu domain was implemented in April 1985 as a generic top-level domains. Six universities were the initial registrants that month.
Until 2001, Network Solutions served as registrar for the .edu domain under an arrangement with the U.S. Department of Commerce. Domain registration was done at no cost to educational institutions. In 2001, the Commerce Department entered into a five-year agreement with Educause making that organization the registrar for the .edu domain. The agreement with Educause was extended for an additional five-year period in 2006; at that time Educause was authorized to begin charging a yearly administrative fee to registrants.
The .edu domain was originally intended for educational institutions anywhere in the world. However, most of the institutions that obtained .edu registrations were in the United States, while non-U.S. educational institutions typically used country-level domains. In 1993, a decision attributed to Jon Postel limited new registrations in the .edu domain to four-year postsecondary educational institutions. This prevented new .edu registrations by community colleges and other institutions offering less than four years of postsecondary schooling.
Enforcement of the restrictions in the 1990s was not entirely effective. The webmaster for the Exploratorium, a San Francisco science museum, recalled in 2006 that the museum obtained its .edu domain name at a time in the early 1990s "when there were about 600 websites and only one for a museum." The museum's Internet registrar allowed it to sidestep the then-extant domain-naming rules by using the .edu extension in spite of not being an academic institution and by using a name with more than 12 characters. Some community colleges were reported to have registered .edu names after 1993. In 1999 an article in Mother Earth News quoted an authority on distance education as saying, "Anyone who has the necessary $70 can register an .edu domain name and use it to archive any type of enterprise on the Internet."
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