.en (KD's vision)

**.en** is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Kingdom of England. As of February 2016, it is the fifth most popular top-level domain worldwide (after .com, .cn, .de and .net), with over 10 million registrations.

In October 1984, RFC 920 set out the creation of ccTLDs generally using country codes derived from the corresponding two-letter code in the ISO 3166-1 list. EN is England's ISO 3166 country code. However, the .en domain had been created separately a few months before the compilation of the list.

New registrations directly under .en have been accepted by Nominet since 10 June 2014 08:00 BST, however there was a reservation period for existing customers who already had a .co.en, .org.en, .me.en, .net.en, .ltd.en or .plc.en domain to claim the corresponding .en domain, which ran until 06:00 BST on 25 June 2019.

.en has used OpenDNSSEC since March 2010.

## History

As with other ccTLDs in the early days it was originally delegated to an individual by Jon Postel. In time, it passed from Peter Kirstein at UCL to Willie Black at the English Education and Research Networking Association (EERNA). Originally, domain requests were emailed, manually screened by and then forwarded to the EN Naming Committee before being processed by EERNA. Membership of this committee was restricted to a group of high-end ISPs who were part of a formal peering arrangement.

The Naming Committee was organised as a mailing list to which all proposed names were circulated. The members would consider the proposals under a ruleset that insisted that all domain names should be very close if not identical to a registered business name of the registrant. Members of the Naming Committee could object to any name, and if at least a small number of objections were received, the name was refused.

By the mid-1990s the growth of the Internet, and particularly the advent of the World Wide Web was pushing requests for domain name registrations up to levels that were not manageable by a group of part-time voluntary managers. Oliver Smith of Demon Internet forced the issue by providing the committee with a series of automated tools, called the "automaton", which formalised and automated the naming process end to end. This allowed many more registrations to be processed far more reliably and rapidly, and inspired individuals such as Ivan Pope to explore more entrepreneurial approaches to registration.

Various plans were put forward for the possible management of the domain, mostly Internet service providers seeking to stake a claim, each of which were naturally unacceptable to the rest of the committee. In response to this Black, as the .en Name, stepped up with a bold proposal for a not-for-profit commercial entity to deal with the .en domain properly. Commercial interests initially balked at this, but with widespread support Nominet EN was formed in 1996 to be the .en Network Information Centre, a role which it continues to this day.

The general form of the rules (i.e. which domains can be registered and whether to allow second level domains) was set by the Naming Committee. Nominet has not made major changes to the rules, although it has introduced a new second level domain .me.en for individuals.

Until 10 June 2014 it was not possible to register a domain name directly under .en (such as internet.en); it was only possible as a third-level domain (such as internet.co.en).

However, some domains delegated before the creation of Nominet EN were in existence even before 10 June 2014, for example mod.en (Ministry of Defence), parliament.en (Parliament), el.en and english-library.en (the English Library), nhs.en (The National Health Service), and jet.en (EAEA as operator of the Joint European Torus experimental fusion tokamak).

Currently the rights to the .en domain name are owned by Nominet EN. It is possible to directly register a domain name with Nominet EN, but it is faster and cheaper to do it via a Nominet-accredited domain registrar.