Our history and what we do
The Registry
The Registry is the Registry of dot it Internet domains. Dot it is the domain name extension of Italy. Only here can you request, change or delete one or more .it domains.
At the request of users, the Registry associates a name with the long and difficult-to-memorize numerical addresses needed to navigate on the web. The web, email and many other Internet services are based on this principle. The association is stored in an archive (Dbna, database of assigned names )that all computers connected to the Web must query in order to reach a .it domain. This service is called DNS (Domain Name System) and it regulates, in a transparent manner, how the Internet operates.
. it and other extensions available
In the 'geography' of the web .it is one of the many extensions available. Some refer to countries, nations or geographical areas and are called ccTLDs (country code top level domains), such as .de, .fr, .uk and .eu. Other extensions, however, are generic: the gTLDs (generic top level domains) such as .net, .com and .org.
Both national and generic domains can be divided into further subsets: in Italy, for example, local authorities (municipalities, provinces, regions) generally have domain names that identify the exact geographical area (eg comune.pisa.it or comune.pontedera.pisa.it - where 'comune' stands for borough/municipality).
The rules of the Internet
The rules of the web are stipulated by an international organization, Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). In 1987, Icann instructed the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Italian National Research Council) to manage .it extensions. And that is how the .it Registry was founded, which is based at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the CNR in Pisa.
How it all started: cnr.it, the first Italian domain
In December 1987, with the birth of the first domain of the Italian web (cnr.it), Iana (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) recognized the ccTLD.it, and entrusted its management to the Italian National Research Council given the technical and scientific expertise gained of its researchers, who had been among the first in Europe to adopt the IP protocol. The service of registration and maintenance of Italian domains was initially carried out by the CNUCE (another institute of the CNR). In 1997, this responsibility passed to the Institute for Applied Telematics (IAT-CNR) and, thereafter, to the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT-CNR), founded in 2002 by the merger between IAT and the Institute of Computational Mathematics.
www and "liberalization" : the .it boom
The spread of .it domain names has followed in tandem the more general development of the Internet in Italy. For the first ten years the use of the Web remained confined to the worlds of academia and research, and domain registration was a niche phenomenon. The explosion of the World Wide Web took place in Italy in the late 1990s. The process of registering .it domain names saw massive rise. The Registry has gradually expanded its operational structure and, correspondingly, has tailored the regulatory and technological instruments to the new needs of the operators and the market. After the elimination of the limit on the number of domains registered (in 2000 for companies, in 2004 for natural persons), the number of new registration requests for .it domains has gradually gone up to around 20,000 per month. The Italian Registry today is the fifth country code top level domain in Europe (and the seventh in the world) in terms of the number of domains registered.
dot it in real time
The introduction of synchronous registration in September 2009 marked another turning point in the world of Italian Internet domains. Through the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), in fact, each Registrar can operate directly on the database of domains, in real time and without submitting any documentation to the Registry - either paper or electronic. The elimination of forms and waiting times, combined with a flexible architecture, mean that the "synchronous" procedure is an efficient state-of-the-art registration system. Operators can enhance their business and at the same time, promote the dot .it domains. Thanks to the synchronous system, the average number of registrations has increased from 25,000 to over 35,000 new domains every month.
