.il

The .il namespace encompasses addresses used by Israeli government institutions, organizations, and other websites; extensions listed in 2020 included .co.il, .gov.il, .org.il, and .ac.il.[2][6] By that year, more than 250,000 .il domain names had been registered.[6]

The Israel Internet Association began allocating names under .il in 1995 and also represented Israel in international Internet forums, including ICANN.[1] The domain subsequently operated alongside a Hebrew-language alternative, .ישראל, while existing .il addresses remained usable.[5]

The .il domain has been in use in Israel since the 1980s.[5] Israel was the third country, after the United States and the United Kingdom, to receive an official domain foothold in cyberspace.[7]

Early registry management was undertaken by Machba, an academic-computing organization that occupied a central position in Israel’s developing Internet activity.[1] During this early period, IANA sought a responsible organization in each country, and Machba assumed responsibility for domain registration in Israel.[1] In 1995, Machba asked the Israel Internet Association to take over the registry because the work involved commercial and legal sensitivities outside its academic remit.[1]

The association began allocating .il names that year, and in July 2001 it amended its bylaws to include the activity among its formal purposes.[1] Domain registration was its principal source of income at the time covered by the Knesset research report.[1]

By February 2002, approximately 59,000 names ending in .il were registered.[1] Registrations during 2001 numbered 9,318, compared with 27,458 in 2000, a decline described as 60 percent.[1] The total had risen to more than 250,000 registered names by 2020.[6]

An early institutional example was IDF.IL, established by Hank Nussbacher and others as part of their work on the IDF Internet.[7] Nussbacher also advised the IDF’s computing center, and the domain continued to exist at the time of the retrospective account of this work.[7]

Government use of .il includes www.info.gov.il/eng/mainpage.htm, identified as the Government Gate providing access to a range of official websites, and www.mfa.gov.il, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website.[2] The latter included a central archive of official government documents.[2] Another example is aguda90.co.il, an Israeli website intended to help people not participating in military service find volunteer opportunities.[8]

Public registration of Hebrew-script domain names retaining the Latin .il suffix opened on December 26, 2010, subject to name availability and registration rules.[9] Before the public opening, companies, nonprofit organizations, and trademark holders had an opportunity to reserve Hebrew names associated with their official names or marks.[4] Remaining names were then made available on a first-come, first-served basis.[4] The initial public opening was distinguished from proposed Hebrew-name registrations with .co.il endings, which were to become available later.[9]

The development of .ישראל provided a separate route to fully Hebrew web addresses.[5] During its launch process in 2022, existing Hebrew-script names under .il were to remain usable, and their holders received a time-limited priority opportunity to convert them to .ישראל.[5] Existing .il addresses were also to continue operating alongside the new domain.[5]

Registration for fully Hebrew, right-to-left names under .ישראל opened in late 2022.[10] These names attracted 10,000 registrations within 24 hours and more than 22,222 by early August 2023.[10] Registration was offered through some of the Israel Internet Association’s accredited registrars at the same registration-fee price as .il, with allocation based on a first-come, first-served principle.[10]

Most websites under .il fall within the National Library of Israel’s annual web-archiving collection, which also includes Hebrew-language websites and websites hosted on servers in Israel.[3] The annual collection gathers millions of websites and constitutes the library’s broadest web-archiving activity.[3]

The Internet Archive project began in September 2013 and copies and preserves Israeli public websites ending in .il, together with additional websites associated with Israeli geolocation or relevant to the Israeli public.[11] Its holdings include documentation of Israeli websites dating back to 1996.[3]

Saved web captures approximately represent a page’s structure and content at the moment of capture.[3] Captures taken at different times and frequencies document changes to websites, preserving successive versions rather than only a single copy.[3]

Historical Internet statistics provide context for the domain’s use: Israel had 1.544 million Internet hosts in 2009 and 2.106 million Internet users in 2008.[12] These figures describe those years rather than current totals.[12]

Responsibility for the .il namespace was the subject of differing governance interpretations: a December 2000 government policy document treated its management as a matter for Internet self-regulation.[1] Journalist Avi Weiss instead argued that first-level domain names belonged to the state and public, and that the government should grant management concessions to nonprofit organizations.[1]