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ICann, UPU sign historice domain name agreement in Geneva

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A new top-level domain, .post , has been created as a result of an agreement signed Saturday12 December by the Universal Postal Union and Icann (Universal Postal Union and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number), which has global responsibility for overseeing Internet domain names. The agreement ties together for the first time at the highest level the physical world of postal services and the Internet. The UPU is the first non-governmental organization to manage a domain, setting a precedent for other UN and international bodies.

The UPU is a United Nations organization based in Bern, Switzerland, established by the 1874 Treaty of Bern to bring order to the chaos of international postal exchanges at the time. Its 191 members are governments, postal services and other stakeholders in the postal delivery business, who together have 600,000 postal service offices around the world.

The negotiations leading  up to the creation of .post took several years, but Paul Donohoe, e-business manager at UPU in Bern says “A top-level domain for a service-oriented industry such as ours is an opportunity to develop a trusted space on the Internet for integrating physical and electronic postal services and .post will be a unique and focused Internet domain with the potential to connect the entire postal community and its customers. The domain will enable the UPU and the postal sector at large to work on delivering new innovative Internet-based international postal services, such as hybrid mail, e-commerce, e-identity, e-communication and e-government, and built on UPU standards.”

Links to other sites: DomainPulse.com, Icann press release, UPU