The network and the transport layers rely on addresses that are encoded as fixed size bit strings. A network layer address uniquely identifies a host. Several transport layer entities can use the service of the same network layer. For example, a reliable transport protocol and a connectionless transport protocol can coexist on the same host. In this case, the network layer multiplexes the segments produced by these two protocols. This multiplexing is usually achieved by placing in the network packet header a field that indicates which transport protocol should process the segment. Given that there are few different transport protocols, this field does not need to be long. The port numbers play a similar role in the transport layer since they enable it to multiplex data from several application processes.
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While addresses are natural for the network and transport layer entities, humans prefer to use names when interacting with network services. Names can be encoded as a character string and a mapping services allows applications to map a name into the corresponding address. Using names is friendlier for humans, but it also provides a level of indirection which is very useful in many situations.
Because names are at a higher level than addresses, they allow (both in the example of programming above, and on the Internet) to treat addresses as mere technical identifiers, which can change at will. Only the names are stable.
The first solution that allowed applications to use names was the :term:`hosts.txt` file. This file is similar to the symbol table found in compiled code. It contains the mapping between the name of each Internet host and its associated address [#fhosts]_. It was maintained by SRI International that coordinated the Network Information Center (NIC). When a new host was connected to the network, the system administrator had to register its name and address at the NIC. The NIC updated the :term:`hosts.txt` file on its server. All Internet hosts regularly retrieved the updated :term:`hosts.txt` file from the SRI_ server. This file was stored at a well-known location on each Internet host (see :rfc:`952`) and networked applications could use it to find the address corresponding to a name.
A :term:`hosts.txt` file can be used when there are up to a few hundred hosts on the network. However, it is clearly not suitable for a network containing thousands or millions of hosts. A key issue in a large network is to define a suitable naming scheme. The ARPANet initially used a flat naming space, i.e. each host was assigned a unique name. To limit collisions between names, these names usually contained the name of the institution and a suffix to identify the host inside the institution (a kind of poor man's hierarchical naming scheme). On the ARPANet few institutions had several hosts connected to the network.
However, the limitations of a flat naming scheme became clear before the end of the ARPANet and :rfc:`819` proposed a hierarchical naming scheme. While :rfc:`819` discussed the possibility of organizing the names as a directed graph, the Internet opted for a tree structure capable of containing all names. In this tree, the top-level domains are those that are directly attached to the root. The first top-level domain was `.arpa` [#fdnstimeline]_. This top-level name was initially added as a suffix to the names of the hosts attached to the ARPANet and listed in the `hosts.txt` file. In 1984, the `.gov`, `.edu`, `.com`, `.mil` and `.org` generic top-level domain names were added. :rfc:`1032` proposed the utilization of the two letter :term:`ISO-3166` country codes as top-level domain names. Since :term:`ISO-3166` defines a two letter code for each country recognized by the United Nations, this allowed all countries to automatically have a top-level domain. These domains include `.be` for Belgium, `.fr` for France, `.us` for the USA, `.ie` for Ireland or `.tv` for Tuvalu, a group of small islands in the Pacific or `.tm` for Turkmenistan. The set of top-level domain-names is managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (:term:`ICANN`). :term:`ICANN` adds generic top-level domains that are not related to a country and the `.cat` top-level domain has been registered for the Catalan language. There are ongoing discussions within :term:`ICANN` to increase the number of top-level domains.
Each top-level domain is managed by an organization that decides how sub-domain names can be registered. Most top-level domain names use a first-come first served system, and allow anyone to register domain names, but there are some exceptions. For example, `.gov` is reserved for the US government, `.int` is reserved for international organizations and names in the `.ca` are mainly `reserved <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca>`_ for companies or users that are present in Canada.
The syntax of the domain names has been defined more precisely in :rfc:`1035`. This document recommends the following :term:`BNF` for fully qualified domain names (the domain names themselves have a much richer syntax).