.br is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Brazil. It was administered by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil) until 2005 when it started being administered by Brazilian Network Information Center (Núcleo de Informação e Coordenação do Ponto br). A local contact is required for any registration. Registrations of domain names with Portuguese characters are also accepted.
With the exception of universities, the second-level domain is fixed and selected from a list that defines the category. For example, site.art.br is in the art (music, folklore etc.) category, and site.org.br is in the non-governmental organization category. Institutions of tertiary education were allowed to use the ccSLD .edu.br, although some use .com.br and others (mainly public universities) use .br. There are also some other few exceptions that were allowed to use the second level domain until the end of 2000. As of April 2010, most domain registrations ignore categories and register in the .com.br domain, which has over 90% of all registered domains. The .jus.br (Judiciary), and .b.br (banks) domains have mandatory DNSSEC use.
History
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Created and delegated to Brazil in 1989 by Jon Postel, initially the domain was operated manually by Registro.br and administered by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP). Originally, only researchers and institutions to which they belonged had the interest and ability to adopt the new system and register domains under .br.
At the time, networks prevalent in the Brazilian academic setting were the BITNET ("Because It's Time NETwork"), the HEPnet ("High Energy Physics Network") and the UUCP ("Unix-to-Unix Copy Program"). As such, even before Brazil officially connected to the Internet in 1991, the .br domain was used to identify the machines participating in networks already in use by academics.
In 1995 the Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil "Internet Management Committee of Brazil" (CGI.br) was created with an objective to coordinate the allocation of Internet addresses (IPs) and the registration of .br domain names. There were 851 domains registered with the Brazilian DNS (Domain Name System") by the beginning of 1996, thereafter experiencing rapid growth with the mass arrival of companies, Internet providers and media onto the Internet. The registration system was automated in 1997 and was developed using open source software.
In 2005, CGI.br created his own executive arm, the Núcleo de Informação e Coordenação do Ponto BR' "The Center for Information and Coordination of Dot BR" (NIC.br), which currently serves in both administrative and operational capacity for the registry.
In 2017, accounts associated with DNS records of Brazilian banks were hacked. Kaspersky's researchers pointed out to a vulnerability in NIC.br's website and suggested its infrastructure had been compromised. NIC's director at the time, Frederico Neves, denied that NIC.br was "hacked", although NIC admitted the vulnerability.
Domain registry
To register any domains under .br, it is necessary to enter into contact with Registro.br. Entities legally established in Brazil as a company ("pessoa jurÃdica") or a physical person ("profissional liberal" and "pessoas fÃsicas") that has a contact within Brazil can register domains. Foreign companies that have a power-of-attorney legally established in Brazil can also do it by following specific rules.
The registration of domains with special Portuguese characters (à , á, â, ã, é, ê, Ã, ó, ô, õ, ú, ü and ç) is accepted since 2005. Although they are not really used, as there didn't have any promotion and consequently almost everybody in Brazil don't even know about it.
Syntactic rules for .br domains
- Minimum of 2 and maximum of 26 characters, not including the category. For example, in the field XXXX.COM.BR, this limitation relates to the XXXX.
- Valid characters are [A-Z, 0-9], the hyphen, and the following accented characters: à , á, â, ã, é, ê, Ã, ó, ô, õ, ú, ü, ç.
- Domains cannot contain only numbers.
- To maintain the integrity of the registry, Registro.br sets up an equivalence mapping to compare domain names with and without accented characters. The mapping is done by converting accented characters and the cedilla for their non-accented versions and "c", respectively, and discards hyphens. A new domain will only be allowed to be registered when there is no equivalent to a pre-existing domain, or when the applicant is the same entity that owns the domain equivalent.
- Note: Specifically for the domain .NOM.BR, it is necessary to choose two names, i.e.: NAME1.NAME2.NOM.BR.
Usage Statistics
.br is the most common Portuguese language Web site suffix, surpassing all other Portuguese-speaking countries' TLDs as well as .com in popularity.
Second level domains
There were initially 66 second-level domains:
However the restriction were dropped in 2013 and there are a significant number of second level domain names currently registered.
References
External links
- IANA .br whois information
- Registro.br : Brazil's official registry administrator
- Second-level domain statistics for .br
- .br Registration
