Registro.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.

History

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 ( pt, 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. There were 851 domains registered with the Brazilian DNS by the beginning of 1996, thereafter experiencing rapid growth with the mass arrival of companies, Internet providers and media onto the Internet. The registration system was automated in 1997 and was developed using open source software.

In 2005, CGI.br created its own executive arm, the Brazilian Network Information Center ( pt, Núcleo de Informação e Coordenação do Ponto BR, or simply NIC.br), which currently serves in both administrative and operational capacity for the registry.

In 2017, accounts associated with DNS records of Brazilian banks were hacked. Kaspersky's researchers pointed out to a vulnerability in NIC.br's website and suggested its infrastructure had been compromised. NIC's director at the time, Frederico Neves, denied that NIC.br was "hacked", although NIC.br admitted the vulnerability.

Domain registry

To register any domains under .br, it is necessary to enter into contact with Registro.br. Entities legally established in Brazil as a company ("pessoa jurídica") or a physical person ("profissional liberal" and "pessoas físicas") that has a contact within Brazil can register domains. Foreign companies that have a power-of-attorney legally established in Brazil can also do it by followin
specific rules

The registration of domains with special Portuguese characters (à, á, â, ã, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú, ü and ç) is accepted since 2005.
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Syntactic rules for .br domains

* Minimum of 2 and maximum of 26 characters, not including the category. For example, in the field XXXX.COM.BR, this limitation relates to the XXXX.
* Valid characters are -Z, 0-9 the hyphen, and the following accented characters: à, á, â, ã, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú, ü, ç.
* Domains cannot contain only numbers.
* To maintain the integrity of the registry, Registro.br sets up an equivalence mapping to compare domain names with and without accented characters. The mapping is done by converting accented characters and the cedilla for their non-accented versions and "c", respectively, and discards hyphens. A new domain will only be allowed to be registered when there is no equivalent to a pre-existing domain, or when the applicant is the same entity that owns the domain equivalent.

:Note: Specifically for the domain .NOM.BR, it is necessary to choose two names, i.e.: NAME1.NAME2.NOM.BR.

Usage statistics

.br is the most common Portuguese language Web site suffix,As of 18 August 2021, Google showed 2.76 billion pages fo
site: .br
351 million fo
site: .pt
(Portugal) and 6.16 million fo
site: .ao
(Angola)
Portuguese pages
in the .com domain were 2.19 billion. surpassing all other Portuguese-speaking countries' TLDs as well as in popularity.

Second-level domains

Direct registration

In 1991, it was decided that universities and research institutes would be allowed second-level .br domains directly. For example: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro got ''ufrj.br''; University of São Paulo got ''usp.br''; National Institute for Space Research got ''inpe.br''; and so on.

In late 2000, the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee reported abuse in this system, and called for all institutions directly under .br to be moved to .edu.br – so, for example, ''ufrj.br'' would become ''ufrj.edu.br''. During a meeting in early 2001, however, the Committee decided it would be of public interest to not move every second-level domain as to avoid confusion, but instead established rules regarding their registration:

* No longer accepting automatic registration of second-level domains, and evaluating every request for one individually;
* Creating edu.br, and forwarding requests from education and research institutions to it;
* Concession to education and research institutes that already had a second-level .br domain, as long as its usage is appropriate and that domain name is related to the institution's name or acronym. Domains approved are automatically duplicated under edu.br as well, and both may exist concurrently – for example, the still existing ''ufrj.br'' also has a registered ''ufrj.edu.br'', although the latter is not used;
* Other institutions not approved above must be migrated permanently to edu.br (but would be given sufficient time for the transition).

As of August 2021, Registro.br reports 1207 domains registered directly under .br.

Predefined domains

As of August 2021, there are 140 different second-level domains of .br under which custom domains can be registered, and they are divided into six categories: "Generic", "Cities", "Universities", "Professionals", "Natural persons" and "Legal persons". They are the following:

Special second-level domains

From 2000 until 2009, during election cycles, electoral candidates could register domains under CAN.br, with the format ''ame
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