This page is a brief guide to information about domain name registration plus a listing of all the country or application names to domain abbreviation assignments used on the Internet.

A brief explanation of Internet addressing nomenclature.

Order

First, a brief explanation of Internet addressing nomenclature is in order. The basic format of an Internet address is : user_domain_name.upper_level_domain .If an email address is assigned, it preceeds the user_domain_name.upper_level_domain as follows : user@user_domain_name.upper_level_domain where user is the individual user's identification name, user_domain_name is the public name for the specific Internet site, such as bcn.boulder.co for BCN, and upper_level_domain is a country code or application, such as .us for BCN's full address of bcn.boulder.co.us. Or .com which is usually assigned to commercial applications.

Internet Protocol address

A second nomenclature to be aware of is the numerical Internet or Internet Protocol address (IP). This is a unique address for every computer linked to the Internet which consists of four numbers, each less than 256, and written as : 000.000.000.000 .This IP address is a very powerful tool for tracing the real source of spam and knowing where to complain to. (See the Internet Spam page.)

Country codes

Third thing that you need to know is the information about country codes. Country codes are based on ISO 3166. They are two or three character codes, but they also correspond to the names assigned by IANA for Upper-level Internet domains. Note that these assignments are current as of June 14, 2000.

You may find the following links useful

See the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for more information about domain names, IP numbers, and technical support.

For information on the federal role in Domain Name management visit the National Telecommunications and Information Administration webpage.

And see the Internic Organization (which is a follow-on to the old Internic Group that managed the Internet in the ArpaNet days) for more information on domain names and registrars.

Better-Whois.com is a website which provides accurate domain name lookup.

When all else fails, or you have just an IP (Internet Protocol) number, what do you do? The UXN Spam Combat website checks overseas registries and tries to translate all valid IP numbers (including "cloaked" ones) to their email or postal address.

Here is a newletter that examines some of the domain name registars and rates them on various criteria Domain Name Buyers Guide

Here is a copy of the Domain and Country Code Assignments