the direction of the Institute (and thus of Registro) was temporarily taken over by Enrico Gregori on 17 May 2006, followed by Domenico Laforenza in 2008. Currently, the Institute is directed by Marco Conti. Since 11 July 2012, it has also been possible to register .it domains with non-ASCII characters (IDN), i.e., special characters, accented letters, etc. Reserved and/or special-use second-level domains Second-level domains are the ones 'before' the .it, and can be of different types: .gov.it is the official second-level domain for the Government and Public Administration. .edu.it is the official second-level domain for educational institutions (schools, universities, etc.). .difesa.it is the official second-level domain for the Italian Armed Forces (excluding the Carabinieri). .esteri.it is the official second-level domain for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Italian diplomatic and consular representatives. Domain names corresponding to provinces (e.g., palermo.it) and their acronyms (pa.it), municipalities, regions, etc. cannot be assigned; they are defined as geographical domains. It is possible to register third-level domains within them, e.g., comune.palermo.it is the domain assigned to the municipality of Palermo, while regione.lazio.it is the domain assigned to the regional government of Lazio. The second-level domain .co.it does not refer to business activities (as is often the case in other countries) but to the regional extension of the province of Como. There are domains reserved exclusively for government bodies, such as italia.it, italy.it, italie.it, etc. References External links IANA .it whois information Italy NIC Technical registration procedures Internet in Italy Country code top-level domains Internet in Italy Mass media in Italy Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries members he:סיומת אינטרנט#טבלת סיומות המדינות sv:Toppdomän#I