Every .gov Domain
270 comments
·February 21, 2025LorenDB
weberer
We know at least one New Hampshire politician really wasn't a fan.
Slump
This brought out an audible chuckle from me. Definitely stealing this and sharing this site with a few co-workers who are heavily into manga/anime. Thanks for the laugh.
xmichael909
[dead]
rcpt
You really can't use sarcasm around that topic. There seems to be no limit to what their supporters will fall for.
switch007
If only DNS could be namespaced..., eg quitman.ga.gov
Only a marginal improvement though
jjmarr
mikepurvis
We have that in Ontario and honestly it's often just kind of a source of confusion, like this is for a specific agency overseeing just the St Lawrence:
Whereas the actual Ontario Parks website is this:
dpedu
Isn't delegating a zone pretty much the same concept in DNS? Or am I missing sarcasm here?
paulddraper
Sarcasm.
People get confused (particularly in the US) if they are always used to x.y.
switch007
Yeah was sarcasm as it seems to be a really obvious thing to do.
We do it in the UK with <councilname>.gov.uk
(Not sure if it's actual delegation or just A records though)
layer8
They are lucky it isn’t quitmaga.gov.
rcpt
Hopefully there's a Dem leader in Georgia who will jump in on the map changing game for this domain
adolph
The Pen Island Effect [0] is so strong I read the comment to mean that the writer was happy it was not the whole of government but a only particular town in Georgia was against Japanese comic books.
Some days I wonder if DNS was a colossal mistake. I have plenty of room for remembering numbers now that phones are dead. (Ignoring the ever looming never quite here ipv6.)
toyg
> Pen Island Effect
In my days it was referred to as expertsexchange...
LorenDB
> The Pen Island Effect [0] is so strong I read the comment to mean that the writer was happy it was not the whole of government but a only particular town in Georgia was against Japanese comic books.
LOL, no. Like I said, I personally don't care for manga/anime but I have nothing against others enjoying it.
adolph
My apologies, I didn't mean to claim you supported the town of Quitman's online jeremiad, but an appreciation that the effort was limited to one municipality.
calvinmorrison
My favorite is handynasty.net which is a great schezuan place here in philadelphia and totally not Handy Nasty.net
brookst
The ultimate remains that great pre-Stack Exchange site, expertsexchange.com. They had to rebrand to add hyphens.
mrkramer
I first thought it was quitmaga.gov
As an insider revolt against Musk's shenanigans. lol
addandsubtract
xD.gov
markus_zhang
Someone needs some pocket cash I guess.
YPPH
US government domains seem a little over the place. I'm surprised by the number of courts and counties that have random .org and .com domains. In Australia, it follows a pretty strict structure: Federal: entity.gov.au State: entity.wa.gov.au (example for State of Western Australia) Local: entity.stirling.wa.gov.au (example for a local government in Western Australia),
So, for example, the Federal Court is fedcourt.gov.au as it's federal.
Strange how the US has such a mishmash.
chasd00
I work with US state governments a lot. Departments treasure their .com domains because they can actually get updates to the zone file without having to go through months (literally) of repeated requests to get something added to the .<state>.gov/us domain. If a department or agency has to reach outside to the state IT department for anything the timeline doubles or triples. It’s a real problem.
frakt0x90
Same for the enterprise (non-tech I assume) world. When I was on the business side, we treasured any compute we could get that was not tied to corporate IT. Going through them would turn a 1 day fix into a 2 week endeavor. Product development would go from 1 month to 6 or more.
bombcar
You've found out a huge reason cloud took off so hard. Lots of it is shadow-IT.
Nobody except a few universities actually uses subdomains as they should be, where you actually delegate the subdomain to the business unit using it.
mlhpdx
Yes. I remember the delight of deploying my first server with a credit card. The previous one had taken 6 weeks and $100,000 out of our department budget. Such a godsend.
belorn
Do you mean that all .gov domains are handled by the same dns service provider? I can understand if the TLD registry is a pain to deal with when it comes to changing information at the top, but zones files? The whole design of dns have delegation as a central feature so that the registry do not need to do everything.
Mountain_Skies
I used to do lots of consulting work for various departments and agencies in the state I was in at the time. The biggest issue was that the state IT department wanted everything centralized, running on only department servers, using a single platform chosen by them (Vignette StoryServer). Most agencies found that to be too restrictive, especially since at the time Vignette only used TCL.
Even worse was the IT department's insistence that agencies sign a 99 year contract for cost sharing, the amount of which would never be known in advance since it would only be calculated quarterly based on all expenses the state IT department incurred hosting state agencies.
Mixtape
Just my $0.02 as a net/sysadmin for a small municipality in the US:
A big part of why we haven't been able/bothered to migrate to a proper .gov domain boils down to the amount of technical debt we'd need to pay back in the process of doing so. Everything that we do uses our non-.gov domain, namely our Office 365 connectors. On top of that, end users' day-to-day communications with the public make use of the existing domain. Modifying that in any capacity could prove disruptive to ongoing communications and potentially render them liable for dropping the ball somewhere. Not to mention that every single internet account ever created by staff using the current domain would need to be migrated or risk being lost forever.
Additionally, we're a small team. Only myself and one other individual would really have the technical knowledge to migrate our infrastructure. The opportunity cost involved would be massive. There are grants available to help us with this, but obtaining/using those can get complicated at times.
Ultimately, the pros just don't outweigh the cons enough to make a huge difference. From a purely academic angle, should we have a .gov TLD? Absolutely. In practice though, the residents and staff are familiar enough with the current one to render it a non-issue. The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
massysett
> They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
I haven't even done that much, I couldn't tell you offhand the URL for my county government. I always just search in Google, which takes me right to the page I need (roads, solid waste, library, etc.)
prmoustache
> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
That mean they can easily be redirected to a phishing website.
Mixtape
Absolutely, and that's a risk that we carry, especially in the public sector. That being said though, I don't know if adopting a better-regulated domain is itself enough to alleviate that.
The very unfortunate reality is that many (most?) users evaluate phishing attempts with the null hypothesis that "this is trustworthy". They are looking for evidence that something is wrong and assuming all is well if they don't find it. To that sort of user, the thinking goes something like:
* Some trustworthy sites use .com.
* My municipality is trustworthy.
* My municipality uses .com.
If you draw out the venn diagram, there's a clear gap in that line of thinking. That doesn't matter to someone's Great Aunt Linda though. She just knows that .com is what goes after Amazon and Google, so it must be good.
With that in mind, could using .gov help to protect those folks? To a certain extent. I can see the argument for keeping the more discerning few from getting scammed. For the broader group though, it won't change anything.
Offhand, the alternative solution that I'd offer would be providing clear communication standards to the public. Specifically, defining when, how, and from whom municipal notifications go out. Think of it like the IRS only sending physical letters; archaic as it seems, it makes it pretty obvious that an email "from them" is bogus. The clearer someone's understanding of where to find us is, the more optimistic I am that they'll get where they need to be.
xp84
> They just memorize "[municipality_website]"
Nah, even worse, they type “municipality” or some butchered typo of it into their browser, triggering a Google search, and click the very first link they see (sponsored or no) - so they can wildly easily be tricked into phishing websites.
Arguably we’re all victims of the decade or so when Google was so good at serving up the right site, so most people just got used to not knowing any URLs. People Google “YouTube” or “cnn” rather than type even the .com after those words.
fencepost
You say there are grants available, but given the current environment actually relying on those seems risky - even if you were actually to get the money up front it seems like it might get clawed back.
Mixtape
You are correct. This is a consideration at all levels of government currently, with faith in those grants' persistence varying based on an individual recipient's responsibilities.
cbozeman
> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.
You've just highlighted the problem. This is something every single human being in America should know, and arguably almost the entire world.
This falls directly under the rubric of Basic Computing Knowledge > Basic Internet Knowledge.
Every single time I see someone searching for "microsoft" or "apple" I immediately stop them and tell them, "You've already done most of the work. Microsoft and Apple are commercial entities. Add .com at the end, which is what .com means. Commercial. You're adding extra work for yourself."
Yes, a few people pop off at the mouth at which point I remind them ignorance is of a thing is easily remedied with a little give-a-damn, and saves everyone time and money.
Talk about a fucking miserable failure of education. I'm 44. I expected the generation 20 years younger than me to be impossibly skilled with computers to the point that I wouldn't hope to even match them, much less surpass them. Instead what we got was a world where we dumbed every goddamn thing down so even the most drooling moron can utilize it.
It's pretty disappointing, to put it mildly.
pests
I think your view on the world might be a little skewed. Every human in the world needs to know how domain names work? What?
EvanAnderson
My county government started w/ a "co.Name.oh.us" domain name back in the late 90s. People in the government hated it. The complaint I heard most frequently was that the public couldn't get it right-- too many dots.
I was a fan of the ".co.name.oh.us" naming because it made logical sense. I could easily find any County website in the state. My intuition now is that anything logical (or, perhaps, just anything I like) will be hated by the public. >sigh<
The county moved to "NameCountyOhio.gov". It's 5 characters longer than the old domain name but isn't hated. The public still gets it wrong often, expecting it to be "NameCountyOH.gov".
Edit:
Okay, so I got this totally wrong. Chalk it up to poor memory for stuff 20+ years ago.
There's RFC 1480, first of all: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1480
The old County domain was "co.name.oh.us". I completely forgot the hierarchy was flipped for localities, with the locality being the higher level domain and the designation for type of locality (city, county, etc) being second.
For K-12 school districts, libraries, colleges, and others, the hierarchy comes first (like "name.lib.oh.us").
abtinf
[countyname].co.[stateabbr].[ctld] is injecting ontological metadata into the data, which is bizarre.
Would be better to just get rid of the “co” layer.
EvanAnderson
There are separate hierarchies for cities (".ci.oh.us", school districts (".k12.oh.us"), public libraries (".lib.oh.us"), and probably others I'm not aware of. It seems like there could be name collisions between those different entities that would necessitate the additional layer.
Edit:
Per my parent comment I screwed this up and misremembered the hierarchies. The locality name comes first for localities, so you'd be looking at things like:
ci.medina.oh.us - City of Medina
co.medina.oh.us - County of Medina
medina.k12.oh.us - The Medina City School District
medina.lib.oh.us - The Medina County District Library
adrianmonk
You can't get rid of the "co". It's needed for disambiguation.
For example, here in Texas, the City of Dallas is located in Dallas County, but they are separate things. If you want to pay a parking ticket that you got in the City of Dallas, you need to go to the city's web site. If you want to pay your property taxes, you need to go to the county's web site.
Also, the City of Austin is located in Travis County. There is an Austin County, but it's 100 miles (160 km) away. The only connection is that they are both named for Stephen F. Austin.
abtinf
Actually I just looked at the original post, which indicates that both oh.gov and ohio.gov exist. Ohio.gov actually works.
So countyname.ohio.gov would be perfect.
0xbadcafebee
That's the genius of having states, counties, cities, towns and villages that are almost entirely decentralized. When an evil force takes over the government and wants to rule the whole country, they can't, because nobody even knows how a single tiny village is organized. Complete disorganization and inefficiency as a defense against tyrrany. (or, well, at least, slowing it down)
cjs_ac
I swear 'defence against tyranny' is the justification for every ridiculous thing the US does.
JustExAWS
Have you been following US politics lately? Right now there is an election denier in a cabinet position. It’s partially a good thing that elections are controlled by states as some protection.
cbozeman
Yeah... and it's largely worked. That's the reason it's employed in the first place.
mschuster91
> When an evil force takes over the government and wants to rule the whole country, they can't, because nobody even knows how a single tiny village is organized.
As we're seeing right now this isn't true. Everyone is afraid because the current federal executive doesn't give a flying f..k about norms, including telling people "comply with what DOGE wants or get fired" or drawing up lists of "Government Gangsters" [1]. And so, everyone is bending over in fear of getting in the crosshairs, getting government spending contracts cut, getting fired, getting death threats like Fauci, or getting extorted to buy ads on Twitter [2].
Side rant: where are all the "don't tread on me" gun nuts that have arsenals rivaling what would be a special forces unit in smaller countries?
[1] https://rollcall.com/2024/12/09/trumps-pick-to-lead-fbi-iden...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-linda-yaccarino-x-...
massysett
> As we're seeing right now this isn't true.
It's absolutely true. My county and state government has not changed. My kid goes to the public school, which has not changed. Indeed some of my state officials are suing the federal government.
State and local governments provide many services of enormous importance: schools, police, fire, roads. The President is not ruling all of that.
formerly_proven
> Side rant: where are all the "don't tread on me" gun nuts that have arsenals rivaling what would be a special forces unit in smaller countries?
They won the election?
foobarian
Luckily they are not the only ones with guns.
Mountain_Skies
Probably out celebrating the shrinking of government, which is one of their core desires, if not their top desire.
rvnx
In that world, we should store that in a blockchain for more efficiency, rather than a csv file.
0xbadcafebee
The whole point is for it to be disorganized and flexible. A blockchain is way too organized and rigid
plorg
My state has a telecommunications network that was responsible for bringing the Internet to schools and libraries in the 90s. As a result many of these institutions were assigned domain names under ia.us, which the network controls on behalf of the state. The state government gets the state.ia.us subdomain, libraries got their own second-level subdomain under lib.ia.us, schools under k12.ia.us (private schools under another level pvt.k12.ia.us, although their website now lists that as pvtk12.ia.us; my elementary school domain of the first form still resolves), community colleges cc.ia.us and so on. I didn't know better at the time and assumed the whole US was organized that way. In any case no one liked having johnd@excelsior.pvt.k12.ia.us as their email address so most of the schools bought a second .net or .org domain.
I know my high school moved off the ICN T1 service in the early 2000s, but it looks like the domain records are still maintained, as the old address still resolves correctly.
Edit: see EvanAnderson below I didn't realize this was ~formalized as an RFC and actually was relatively standard across states, I assume for the same reasons very few public entities were using these hierarchal addresses as their primary by the time I really got online in the mid 2000s.
arscan
URLs are a part of the UX of websites. The domain often represents the first interaction between the user and the site. Domains that follow a strict hierarchical structure that aligns to some real-world hierarchy may not be the best first interaction with the user, or at least not in the opinion of those that are creating the site.
So, I think it’s natural for site owners to want this freedom. Then it comes down to whether there should be constraints forced on them or not by policy for some greater good. In the US, generally, central planning on this type of stuff isn’t really part of the culture.
nothrabannosir
Oh I thought you were going the exact opposite direction with that reasoning. A hierarchical url is good because it immediately establishes trust and provenance. Currently I never know whether I’m dealing with a for profit entity pretending to be governmental, or actual government.
But maybe that is part of the culture?
arscan
To technical people, sure. I don’t think the average person knows about provenance rules of subdomains though and how it’s useful… it’s more just a bunch of symbols they don’t care about.
And we understand the threats here… a very real problem is someone forgetting to renew one of these .org or .com domains (maybe the person that maintains it retired) and a malicious actor grabs it after expiration, stands up a scraped copy, and uses it to collect parking ticket payments or whatever.
I was actually thinking a bit more about the diversity of domain names under .gov, though I realize now that the parent comment I replied to was about .org and .coms. I think you get a bit of those provenance assurances if they are under .gov, as a practical matter it’s harder for malicious actors to own one of those than one under other tlds. And then instead of forcing a strict taxonomy that is mostly for the benefit of the infrastructure maintainers (very enterprise software), there is freedom to use a name that makes the most sense for the target user.
cbozeman
No, people need to learn how the Internet is organized and named. It's the same as learning the Dewey Decimal system so you can navigate your local library.
It should be taught in school exactly the same way. It's more important in the year 2025 to know that, than it is the Dewey Decimal system, which is still taught in a majority of schools for some reason.
People should know what it means to be connected to a .gov, .com, .org, .edu, .net, .mil site, etc. I know we have a lot of new TLDs, but knowing the originals should be a bare minimum. This isn't rocket science, hell, most of these domains are almost self-explanatory even as three letter codes.
BobaFloutist
Nobody knows the Dewey Decimal system, they know subject/author/title hierarchy at best, and even then given the ambiguity in subjects they often resort to the computers or librarians to search the catalogue and get directions.
sybercecurity
The .gov TLD was only for the Federal government in the past, it was opened up later to state/local governments. By then, some had already had <something>.<state>.us, or some other TLD. Most probably thought it was too troublesome to migrate over. That and the fees were more than any other gTLD (though not now).
xattt
Canadian domain names in the 90s also followed this newsgroup-like syntax: <website>.<city>.<province>.ca
At least one site (transit.toronto.on.ca) still has an active domain in that format, even though it’s not operationally-related by the City of Toronto.
It’s quaint that folks wanted to root their web presence in their physical world.
LorenzoGood
Like ouac.on.ca.
mixdup
> Strange how the US has such a mishmash
We have so many subdivisions, and in many/most cases there's no accountability (by design) from one level to the next
Feds can't force states to use .gov addresses, and most states don't force counties or cities to use whatever the state's top level is. Some do, or try to encourage, but it's like herding cats and when there's 50 states and a couple thousand counties, and then tens of thousands of cities that all have varying levels of authority to enforce anything on the next level down it's never, ever going to be uniform for us
edent
The equivalent for the UK is https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-gov-uk-do...
(I helped open that up when I was there.)
numinix
The parish council websites seem to have a lot of freedom to run their own standards. Lots of WP and shall we say 'nostalgic' web design!
ChrisRR
Given how many parish councils are just a bunch of biddies, be thankful they even have websites.
markx2
Having served on a parish council there can certainly be a technology challenge for some.
There are services which will do the work - https://cuttlefish.com/local-councils/ - https://www.parishcouncil.net - are two of many. These have their drawbacks, may not provide exportable data so locking the council in. Some will allow direct access, some require that any new content be sent to them and they upload it.
Some councils will own their domain name, some will not. Then there is the email issue and many will use a gmail / hotmail address.
Cost, especially these days, is also a factor.
I don't see it as a bad thing to have so much variety though.
jonathantf2
Our local parish council don't have SPF, DKIM or DMARC set up so every single meeting is just a back and forth of "well I didn't receive that e-mail"
croisillon
TIL a new word!
toyg
One thing that British local government definitely is NOT, is consistent. 500 years of continuous monarchic rule means the backbone of the State is a rickety Rube Goldberg machine, riddled with absurdities and obsolete entities that change every few miles. What you mention is the tip of an iceberg as big as Greenland, where every other town or region is administered in fundamentally different ways for no particularly good reason beyond "that's how it's always been".
For all their centralist instincts, the Westminster classes fundamentally don't care about how the provinces go about their business, as long as they keep paying into London and act adequately subservient whenever the Southern classes come knocking. So we have to live with constitutional aberrations like Cornwall and Lancaster.
rsynnott
There are over 10,000 of them, many absolutely tiny.
pratio
For those like me who want know how the page was built. It's using https://githubnext.com/projects/flat-data/. You can cycle through commits and files. Love it.
Example of another such pages: https://flatgithub.com/the-pudding/data?filename=boybands%2F...
It felt a bit like datasette and no wonder it's the inspiration as well
renegat0x0
I struggled for some time how to maintain data in repository. Initially stored them in a JSON files (1k per file). This, eventually, became tedious.
In the end I just redistribute SQLite file now with the data. It is easier for the "user" to use ready database than a set of files.
beklein
If you are only interested in the neat table UI check: https://github.com/githubocto/flat-ui
Eikon
Seems like this is missing quite a few :) https://www.merklemap.com/search?query=*.gov&page=0
Exported to use the same viewer as the other list:
https://flatgithub.com/barre/all_dot_gov_domains?filename=al...
thrdbndndn
The list in your link includes all the subdomains, so I can't really tell if it's more complete than OP's list.
amanda99
Here is an interesting diff:
https://github.com/cisagov/dotgov-data/compare/57e66bcb0fccc...
beams_of_light
dei.gov redirects to waste.gov. It's a PHP site with only a password entry form.
chriscjcj
Not every. Bart.gov is missing.
(I found it in the data source, but not on the website that was linked to.)
0xdade
Yeah based on the linked document, it's missing about 1000 apex domains based on the .gov zone export from today. Even the current-full.csv on the latest commit in github is short about 1000 apex domains.
$ cat 2025-02-21-gov.txt | cut -f1 | uniq | wc -l 13345
But nevertheless, I like seeing it made easily available on github!
atxlurker
This is far from an exhaustive list of the .gov domain. Perhaps it is only the ones managed at the Top level. For instance, Texas.gov is listed here, but none of the subdomains are. For example gov.texas.gov, house.texas.gov, senate.texas.gov, comptroller.texas.gov, etc...
null
jeffmc
Interesting list. I geocoded the data and created an interactive searchable map of the sites - https://ramadda.org/repository/a/dotgov
m-hodges
For a few years I’ve been operating the EveryDotGov bot; formerly on Twitter, formerly on Mastodon, now on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/everydotgov.bsky.social
gr33nq
I registered and currently manage one of these .gov domains. Registration took some time, but it was an interesting process and felt pretty cool once it was finally provisioned!
I was quite confused why the government would create an entire site telling people to stop consuming manga. I mean, I personally don't care for manga/anime stuff, but really?
Turns out it's just a website for Quitman, GA. https://quitmanga.gov