.br

.br is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Brazil. It was administered by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee until 2005 when it started being administered by Brazilian Network Information Center. A local contact is required for any registration. Registrations of domain names with Portuguese characters are also accepted. With the exception of universities, the second-level domain is fixed and selected from a list that defines the category. For example, is in the art (music, folklore etc.) category, and is in the non-governmental organization category. Institutions of tertiary education were allowed to use the ccSLD , although some use and others (mainly public universities) use . There are also some other few exceptions that were allowed to use the second level domain until the end of 2000. As of April 2010, most domain registrations ignore categories and register in the domain, which has over 90% of all registered domains. The (Judiciary), and (banks) domains have mandatory DNSSEC use. Created and delegated to Brazil in 1989 by Jon Postel, initially the domain was operated manually by Registro.br and administered by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP). Originally, only researchers and institutions to which they belonged had the interest and ability to adopt the new system and register domains under .br. At the time, networks prevalent in the Brazilian academic setting were the BITNET ("Because It's Time NETwork"), the HEPnet ("High Energy Physics Network") and the UUCP ("Unix-to-Unix Copy Program"). As such, even before Brazil officially connected to the Internet in 1991, the .br domain was used to identify the machines participating in networks already in use by academics. In 1995 the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil, or simply CGI.br) was created with an objective to coordinate the allocation of Internet addresses (IPs) and the registration of .br domain names.