Recommended reading

Legal/policy

• DOTGOV Act of 2020
  • This is the "enrolled bill", or the version that passed Congress. It's the version of the law that's easiest to read in totality.
  • The DOTGOV Act was part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 and is codified at 6 U.S.C. 665.
  • (Each of these 3 links to different versions of the DOTGOV Act are essentially the same text! Sharing all of them simply for context.)
• M-23-10, “The Registration and Use of .gov Domains in the Federal Government”. OMB policy released to meet 6 USC 665(d)(1), it governs only federal executive branch agency requests/domains.

Operations

• Everything on https://get.gov/, but particularly all the content on https://get.gov/domains, our recent blog posts, and the domain data. (Shout out that https://get.gov/domains/executive-branch-guidance/ is related to M-23-10.)
• The performance work statement for our contract with Cloudflare. The first 6 sections are salient to for the product team.
• A Census Bureau document that describes the GMAF, or the Government Master Address File. Census conducts a quinquennial "census of governments") about the makeup of non-federal government orgs in the US and maintains the File. GMAF is not public but a cut of it is.
  • This is largely the same as the front matter of the Census's Individual State Report, which summarizes the census of governments on a per-state level. This report is more than 300 pages but is really useful.

Technical standards

• EPP RFCs
• DNS Terminology RFC

Other stuff

• How DNS Works
• M-22-09, the Federal Zero Trust Memo, page 19, the section titled "Discovering internet-accessible applications". See also https://search.gov/about/policy/govt-urls.html
• https://www.netmeister.org/blog/tlds.html - About TLDs (JSchauma's website has lots of really great things.)
• https://xkcd.com/2480/ - No, The Other One