U Of T Has Toronto.edu?

[grcorp]

I just came across a link on Google to a webpage at the University of Toronto that was under the domain toronto.edu - which I found to be quite strange, as my understanding of Educause's requirements for .edu domain names has always been that an institution must be US-based (with a very narrow scope of exceptions) in order to qualify for a .edu name. Additionally, I've not seen any University of Toronto webpage that wasn't under the ultimate domain of utoronto.ca.

If you don't believe me, have a look for yourself... https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=hkMwVcD1NuzH8gfOw4HgBg&gws_rd=ssl#q=toronto.edu

I checked the WHOIS record, and it appears as though toronto.edu was registered in 1986 - well before the rules changed in 2001, of course.

But this baffled me for a few reasons. Obviously, they've got no reason to relinquish the domain. But as it's a US thing, I wonder why they would even have registered it in the first place, in 1986? The internet hadn't even taken off yet, so there's no way they could have seen the prestige associated to it.

Speaking of prestige, though - now that it's a known status symbol of an institution, why wouldn't they use toronto.edu?

What gets me the most, though, is that typing in www.toronto.edu goes nowhere. It's set up not to resolve, whereas direct links to certain pages do resolve.

But ultimately, I'm just surprised that this even exists. Honestly, it looks funny, because all I can think of when i hear ".edu" is US universities.

Anyone got any commentary on this one?

 

[katherine]

While .edu is overwhelmingly US, it is open to foreign institutions.
The requirements are outlined here: https://net.educause.edu/edudomain/eligibility.asp

True, we often lump .edu together with .mil & .gov, which are strictly US-restricted. That must be the reason why they'd rather put the emphasis on .ca today even though .edu is prestigious like you said.

In 1986, the landscape was much different. The first domain names had been added to the root just a year earlier. There were few TLDs in the beginning: .com .net .us .il .mil + a couple others and of course .edu.
.ca was only added to the root in 1987 (still earlier than most other ccTLDs).
I guess ubc.ca must have been one of the very first .ca registered.
In 1986 you could not have a .ca yet, so the only way to interconnect on the Internet/Arpanet was to use whichever TLD was most suitable to you.