Domains of Control: Governance of and by the Domain Name System
Kenneth Merrill · Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2016
Referred to by some as the Internet’s phone book, the Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system that translates between the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses used by computers to route packets of information (text, video, audio, etc.) across the Internet (e.g., 147.9.2.4) and the alphanumeric domain names we humans use to access websites (e.g., Mathias Trabandt and Harald Uhlig, How Do Laffer Curves Differ across Countries? (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012), www.american.edu ). At the top of this classification system is the root-zone file, an authoritative record of all top-level domains (TLDs)—the identifiers that follow the “dot” in a web address (e.g. the “.com” in google.com )—and their corresponding IP address numbers. TLDs can be broken into two distinct categories: generic top-level domains (gTLDs) (e.g., .com, .org, and .edu) and country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) (e.g., .uk, .us, and .fr). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.