.gov

Use of the domain gov 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.[2]

The URL for registration services is www.dotgov.gov.[3]

To register a gov domain, a letter of authorization must be submitted to the GSA. For federal agencies, the authorization must be submitted by a 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.[4] For Native Sovereign Nations, the authorization must come from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.[5]

In November 2019, it was discovered that the process was flawed after a researcher impersonated the mayor of Exeter, Rhode Island in a letter of authorization and GSA approved the request without verification. In response, CSA said it had implemented additional fraud prevention controls to avoid a recurrence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency launched an effort to assume control over the issuance of all gov domains.[6]

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 (e.g. fortworthtexas.gov or detroitmi.gov). However, several cities registered .gov domain names using only the full name of the city (such as boston.gov and seattle.gov) or a common abbreviation (e.g. phila.gov for Philadelphia and nyc.gov for New York) without reference to the state before the GSA adopted the convention; the GSA grandfathered these domains, allowing them to remain despite the new convention.[7]

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[8] 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.[9]

Since May 2012, the Federal Executive Branch has a policy of registering no new second-level domains for its agencies, except on a case-by-case basis. Agencies are also prohibited from using other top-level domains such as .org and .com.[10] "Federal Agency domains" were also deleted on August 26, 2014.[1]

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

While the use of gov as a top-level domain is restricted to the United States, several other countries have second-level domains of the same name or similar semantics for governmental purposes, including:

• usa.gov
• .us

• IANA gov whois information
• RFC 920, Domain Requirements (defined .com and the other original top-level domains)
• RFC 2146, U.S. Government Internet Domain Names
• Complete list of .gov domains