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Community Colleges to Get ".Edu" Domain Name
After several years of lobbying, community colleges have cause to rejoice: they will likely gain access to the ".edu" domain name. The U.S. Department of Commerce announced in April that it had selected Educause, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of technology in higher education, to manage the ".edu" Internet domain. Educause, which counts many community colleges among its 1,800 institutional and corporate members, supports the extension of the ".edu" domain to such colleges.
For years, community colleges have been routinely barred from registering Internet addresses that conclude in ".edu," the ending typically used by four-year institutions. Instead, they have been encouraged to use addresses incorporating "cc" and state and country codes. The Web site address for Gadsden State Community College in Alabama, for example, is <www.gadsdenst.cc.al.us>. But such addresses are more difficult to remember, say community college administrators. In addition, many found the refusal of rights to ".edu" insulting.
Denying the ".edu" domain "reinforces the impression among the uninformed that community colleges are not ‘real’ colleges," wrote David Pierce, past president of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), in a May 2000 letter to Network Solutions, the corporation that had been responsible for deciding who did and did not qualify for the domain. Registries of Web site addresses in other domains—including ".com," ".net," and ".org"—are handled by different organizations.
Although ".edu" domain names have been managed by private organizations, eligibility rules are assigned by the Commerce Department. The denial of ".edu" to community colleges resulted from a 1993 rule limiting the academic Internet domain to four-year, degree-granting institutions. Network Solutions was criticized, however, for applying the rules inconsistently. The Commerce Department, in its statement announcing the choice of the organization as domain manager, acknowledged that the issue has been a problem, saying that Educause intends to "implement a policy more responsive to the needs" of community colleges.
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