IAHC

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Prior to the globalization of the Internet, its assignment of domain names was administered within the research and academic communities through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). As the Internet grew to a global service, in the 1990s, there was increasing pressure to add more "generic" top-level domain names, beyond the initial set, such as .com and .org and the two-letter country codes. Extensive debate within the Internet operational community did not resolve this. Finally, a composite group was formed, to create a proposal for the enhancement. The International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) was composed of members named by a variety of Internet and International sponsoring organizations.

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The IAHC had a limited charter: "The IAHC is an international, multi-organization effort for specifying and implementing policies and procedures relating to iTLD." ('international' TLDs are now called 'generic' TLDs, or gTLDs.)

Sponsoring Organizations

Members of IAHC:

Results

The IAHC produced a draft proposal with a number of administrative recommendations, beyond the set of candidate gTLD names. These included:

The group's work culminated in a "Memorandum of Understanding". It describes a procedure of allocation and administration for domain names, specifically top-level domains. The "Generic Top Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding" (gTLD-MoU) was open to signature by any organization, with approximately 226 groups doing so.

The organization was dissolved on 1 May 1997. Its effort was subsumed under the authority of ICANN. When the U.S. government's activities concerning Internet Domain Name administration issued its preliminary "Green Paper" in 1998, the efforts of the IAHC were not referenced. However, the final "White Paper" gave credit to the IAHC efforts: "The IAHC issued a draft plan in December 1996 that introduced unique and thoughtful concepts for the evolution of DNS administration." The structure of ICANN, including the UDRP and the registrar/registry construct, was ultimately based on the substance of the proposals in the IAHC gTLD-MoU.

Proposed TLDs

The IAHC proposed seven new top-level domains:

.artsculture and entertainment
.firmbusinesses
.infoinformation services
.nompersonal nomenclature
.recrecreation and entertainment
.store   businesses selling goods
.webWorld Wide Web related

The gTLD-MoU interim Policy Oversight Committee replaced .store with .shop.

The IAHC and gTLD-MOU effort did not produce implementation of these names. (The .info that now exists came from a later proposal under ICANN.)

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A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last non empty label of a fully qualified domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.com, the top-level domain is .com. Responsibility for management of most top-level domains is delegated to specific organizations by the ICANN, an Internet multi-stakeholder community, which operates the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and is in charge of maintaining the DNS root zone.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">.hk</span> Internet country code top-level domain for Hong Kong

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">.coop</span> Top-level domain

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">.cn</span> Internet country-code top level domain for the Peoples Republic of China

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generic top-level domain</span> Top level domain without country association.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">.co</span> Internet country-code top level domain for Colombia

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