The only reference is descriptive rather than policy setting. .INT predates RFC1591. It says, simply "This domain is for organizations established by international treaties, or international databases". (The latter term is undefined, but includes telephony applications). You will find this text alongside all the other (at the time) existing generic domains as follows. Much of what is written below has been changed, and much of what has been changed was changed outside ICANN. I would be interested to know which policy decision classified some of the gTLDs in this list as "dehors ICANN", and which within. But as two of the gTLDs described in RFC 1591 are currently extremely sensitive (MIL and GOV),from what I heard in the Senate hearing, perhaps its best not to ask for an answer to this until after the end of the month??
World Wide Generic Domains:
COM - This domain is intended for commercial entities, that is companies. This domain has grown very large and there is concern about the administrative load and system performance if the current growth pattern is continued. Consideration is being taken to subdivide the COM domain and only allow future commercial registrations in the subdomains.
EDU - This domain was originally intended for all educational institutions. Many Universities, colleges, schools, educational service organizations, and educational consortia have registered here. More recently a decision has been taken to limit further registrations to 4 year colleges and universities. Schools and 2-year colleges will be registered in the country domains (see US Domain, especially K12 and CC, below).1
NET - This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers, the administrative computers, and the network node computers. The customers of the network provider would have domain names of their own (not in the NET TLD).
ORG - This domain is intended as the miscellaneous TLD for organizations that didn't fit anywhere else. Some non- government organizations may fit here.
INT - This domain is for organizations established by international treaties, or international databases.
United States Only Generic Domains:
GOV - This domain was originally intended for any kind of government office or agency. More recently a decision was taken to register only agencies of the US Federal government in this domain. State and local agencies are registered in the country
Postel [Page 2]
RFC 1591 Domain Name System Structure and Delegation March 1994
domains (see US Domain, below).
MIL - This domain is used by the US military.