1. Overview

Do you work on technical or software documentation, where you provide some illustrative examples for domain names?

Then, you must know about "example" domains.

2. Content

2.1. What are example domains and where do we use them?

Example domains are created and intended for general use in any kind of documentation to give an example of a domain in any technical or software documentation, manuals, or sample software configurations.

The examples domains that are available today are:

  • example.com
  • example.org
  • example.net
  • example.edu

All these example domains can be used or referred without prior permission from IANA or ICANN.

IANA stands for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and ICANN stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

2.2. Who operates these domains?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) operates these websites with content that reflects their purpose.

ICANN is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation, that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (or IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, and many more.

They just have a home page mentioning their purpose, as shown in the below snapshot.

2.3. Some of the real-time use cases

One of the forms on Google Adsense has used the domain "example.com" as an example for a domain or a website as shown in the below snapshot.

3. Conclusion

You should know about example domains and where and how they can be used.