.gov

The domain name gov is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. The name is derived from government, indicating its restricted use by government entities in the United States. The gov domain is administered by the General Services Administration (GSA), an independent agency of the United States federal government.

The U.S. is the only country that has a government-specific top-level domain in addition to its country-code top-level domain. This is a result of the origins of the Internet as a U.S. federal government-sponsored research network (see ARPANET and National Science Foundation Network). Other countries typically delegate a second-level domain for this purpose, for example: .gc.ca is the second-level domain for the Government of Canada and all subdomains.

Some U.S. federal agencies use fed.us rather than gov. The Department of Defense and its subsidiary organizations use the mil sTLD. Some U.S. governmental entities use other domains, such as com domains by the United States Postal Service (which uses both usps.gov and usps.com for the same website, although it only advertises the com address), and the United States Army's recruitment website (goarmy.com, this trend is repeated at the recruitment websites of the other branches of the U.S. military).

All governments in the U.S. were allowed to apply for delegations in gov before May 2012, such as atlantaga.gov for the city of Atlanta, loudoun.gov for the county of Loudoun, Virginia and georgia.gov for the U.S. state of Georgia. This was not always true; under an earlier policy, only federal agencies were allowed to use the domain, and agencies beneath cabinet level were required to use subdomains of their parent agency. There is a lack of consistency in addresses of state and local government sites, with some using gov, some us, some using both (the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania uses www.pa.gov, www.pennsylvania.gov and www.state.pa.us for the same web site) and still others in com, org or other TLDs.

Availability

Use of the gov domain is restricted to government entities. According to GSA guidelines, this includes U.S. Governmental departments, programs, and agencies on the federal level; federally recognized tribes (referred to by the GSA as Native Sovereign Nations, which must use the suffix -NSN.gov); State governmental entities and programs; cities and townships represented by an elected body of officials; counties and parishes represented by an elected body of officials; and U.S. territories.

The URL for registration services is http://www.dotgov.gov.

Authorization

To register a gov domain, a letter of authorization must be submitted to the GSA. For federal agencies, the authorization must be submitted by cabinet-level chief information officer (CIO). For state governments, authorization from the governor or state CIO is required. Domains for cities require authorization from the mayor or equivalent official; for counties, authorization may be submitted by county commissioners or equivalent officials, or by the highest-ranking county official. For Native Sovereign Nations, the authorization must come from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Naming conventions

The GSA provides guidelines for naming of second-level domains, such as those used by state and local governments. For states, the domain name must include the full state name or postal abbreviation, and the abbreviation must not be obscured by inclusion in a larger word. For example, invalid.gov for Idaho would be an unacceptable domain name. For local governments, the domain name must include the state name or abbreviation. However, many .gov domain names (such as boston.gov and seattle.gov) do not conform to the naming convention because they were already registered before the GSA enacted this policy.

Policy

Policy regarding the gov domain is laid out in 41 CFR Part 102-173.

No new gov domains for U.S. federal executive branch departments have been allowed to be registered since June 13, 2011, as a result of the implementation of Executive Order 13571 issued by President Obama. The move was part of a general attempt to improve the efficiency of U.S. governmental Web usage by weeding out unnecessary, redundant, outdated, or wasteful sites.

From May 2012, the Federal Executive Branch is acting under the policy of “no new domains”. A number of old “Federal Agency domains” were also deleted on August 26, 2014.

States and territories in .gov

As of February 2014, all states, the District of Columbia, and all territories except for the Northern Mariana Islands have operational domains in gov:

International equivalents

• Australia: .gov.au
• Belgium: .fgov.be
• Canada: .gc.ca
• France: gouv.fr
• Hong Kong: .gov.hk
• Japan: .go.jp
• Mexico: .gob.mx
• New Zealand: .govt.nz
• Quebec: .gouv.qc.ca
• Romania: .guv.ro
• South Korea: .go.kr
• United Kingdom: .gov.uk