Entry

Who governs, allocates second-level domains? Is there a register?

Jan 19th, 2008 09:28
dman, Laurent Chouinard, lee goddard, http://sturly.com

Second-level domains are managed in many different ways, depending on 
the situation. Each Top-level domain has it's own way of doing things. 
Some give 2nd-level domains to all that ask, others don't. Let's 
analyse two examples: foo.com, and foo.co.uk.
Generic Top-Level Domains (TLD) (.com, .net, .org, .mil, .gov, .edu) 
are now under the management of several registrars (It used to be 
managed by a single organization). Those companies/organizations each 
assign and manage second-level domains, and they all share a global 
database to ensure that all their informations are "in sync" with each 
other, so to avoid giving a 2nd level domain to someone when someone 
else already owns it. The most known organization that is involved in 
this process is Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com). 
All two-letter country code TLDs (.ca, .uk, .fr, etc) are each managed 
by one organization for each. For example, the .uk TLD is managed by 
Nominet UK (www.nic.uk). Like some other countries, they've decided to 
subdivise their namespace in second-level domains that represents 
different categories. Like .co is for "commercial". So a person wanting 
a commercial domain under the .uk namespace could'nt get a second-level 
domain, he would be assigned a third-level domain, like foo.co.uk. 
Canada used to do it differently. They would give 2nd-level domains 
to 'nationwide' organizations. If a company was located only in one 
province, they would get a 3rd-level domain under their province code. 
Like a company in Quebec only would get: foo.qc.ca
To simplify, second-level domains are the responsibility of the TLD 
they fall under. A third-level domain would then be assigned by the 
holder of the 2nd-level domain, and so forth. Many regular companies 
give out/sell subdomains of their own, since they are owners of their 
domain. Like for example, ml.org used to give 3rd-level domains under 
their own domain, so anyone could be given foo.ml.org directly from 
them.