.ie is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) which corresponds with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for Ireland. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) list the Computing Services Computer Centre of University College Dublin as its sponsoring organisation for the .ie domain. Since 2000 the business of administrating the domain registry has been handled by IE Domain Registry Limited. Domain name registration is open to individuals located in, or with a significant connection with, any part of the island of Ireland. In 2006, .irish was a proposed new generic top-level domain (gTLD) for the global Irish community.

History

.ie was registered on 27 January 1988 and a year later the registration of .ie domain names was delegated by Jon Postel to the Computing Services Computer Centre of University College Dublin, then headed by Dennis Jennings. In 2000, the administration of the .ie domain was sub-delegated by UCD to a new company, IE Domain Registry Limited.

The Computing Services Computer Centre of University College Dublin remains the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority's sponsoring organisation for the .ie domain.

Ie (家, lit. "house") were pre-modern Japanese trading houses and precursors to the modern zaibatsu and keiretsu. They first emerged in the mid-18th century, and shared many features with the Western concept of cottage industry. The ie operated on a system very similar to what economists today call the "Putting-Out system" or "workshop system." City-based merchants would provide rural producers with raw materials and equipment, and would then sell the final product in the cities.

This level of organization to production, with one trading house (in effect, one company) controlling production, transportation, and sales, was unprecedented in Japan, and can easily been seen as the forerunner to the factory system, economic and industrial modernization, and the rise of the zaibatsu (Japanese monopolies). One of the key differences, organizationally, however, between the ie and the zaibatsu which would come later is that the ie always focused on producing and selling only one or two types of goods; so-called "horizontal zaibatsu" would seek to deal in many unrelated types of goods. For example, today, Mitsubishi is both an automobile company and a bank.

The ie (家) is a Japanese term which translates directly to household. It can mean either a physical home or refer to a family’s lineage. It is popularly used as the “traditional” family structure. The physical definition of an ie consists of an estate that includes a house, rice paddies and vegetable gardens, and its own section in the local cemetery. The symbolic definition of ie has been referred to as the cultural medium for the physical processes of kinship, such as mating and procreation. The symbolic ie refers not only to blood lines, however, but also to economic and socioreligious functions that take place within the family

Family Registration and Status