Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Kaitlin Abbitt edited this page Aug 5, 2024 · 3 revisions

Project overview

The DOTGOV Act says that “the citizens of the United States deserve online public services that are safe, recognizable, and trustworthy.” Since a .gov domain is only available to bona fide US-based government organizations, using it signals trust and credibility. All government organizations in the United States are .gov’s current or potential customers, and these governments represent and serve the American public. Our aim is to make the work of governments less complex and more secure online so the public is better served.

Project goals

  • Growth and use: Regular growth in the overall number of .gov domains registered, with clear increases in election orgs, major metro areas, and state legislatures/courts
  • Data: The program maintains authoritative contacts at, metadata about, and hostname information for all registered .gov domains, and is able to track that .gov domains are actually used
  • User satisfaction: Getting a .gov domain is as easy and intuitive as possible
  • Program reputation and experience: The .gov program is viewed as trustworthy and responsive

Our product strategy file explains these goals in more detail.

Brief project history

  • In 1985, the .gov top-level domain (TLD) was established.
  • Around 1997, the General Services Administration (GSA) began administering .gov.
  • In February 2011, GSA granted Verisign a contract to provide domain name registration services under the .gov and fed.us domain names.
  • In 2020, Congress passed the DOTGOV Act, a law which formally authorized the operation of the .gov TLD as a federal responsibility. Additionally, it transitioned management of the .gov registry from GSA to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and expanded .gov eligibility among public entities.
  • In 2021, we made .gov domains free for eligible US-based government organizations
  • In 2022, we began working with 18F to discover, design/build, and eventually transition to a new, open-source, CISA-managed registrar. The partnership concluded in March/April 2024.
  • In November 2022, Cloudflare was awarded a contract to take over Verisign’s registry services and provide authoritative DNS for .gov.
  • In November 2023, we launched our MVP of the new .gov registrar platform for existing registrants and officially transitioned from Verisign to Cloudflare
  • At the end of January 2024, we launched a new process for requesting domains in the registrar, and launched a redesigned get.gov info site
Clone this wiki locally