Internet address

Internet | = I = | Internet Death Penalty

Internet address n.

1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a sitename, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast with bang path; see also the network and network address. All Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since 1980 or so. See also bang path, domainist. 2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet; this includes bang path addresses and some internal corporate and government networks.

Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a selection of geographical domains:

> com
>   commercial organizations
> edu
>   educational institutions
> gov
>   U.S. government civilian sites
> mil
>   U.S. military sites

Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are in the U.S. or Canada.

> us
>   sites in the U.S. outside the functional domains
> su
>   sites in the ex-Soviet Union (see kremvax).
> uk
>   sites in the United Kingdom

Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally with a name identical to the state's postal abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.

Internet | = I = | Internet Death Penalty