The Republic of Austria is not the only one celebrating a birthday this year: Austria’s Internet also has many reasons to celebrate. Exactly 30 years ago, the Country Code Top-Level Domain .at was added to the global Domain Name System. In 1998, the Austrian Registry nic.at was founded together with the report centre Stopline. 10 years later, CERT.at (Austria’s Computer Emergency Response Team) was founded.

“Who would have thought 30 years ago, that two little letters in a US database would make up the home base of Austrians in the World Wide Web?“, Richard Wein and Robert Schischka, the CEO and CTO of nic.at, are still wondering. They proudly look back to the success story of Austria’s Internet, which they were able to shape in the past years.

It all started at the University of Vienna on January 20th, 1988 with an E-Mail that only read „DONE“. Internet pioneer Jon Postel had confirmed Peter Rastl, former head of the IT department, that .at was added to the global Domain Name System. Three years later, the University of Vienna started to delegate domain names publicly, at first only under .co.at (for companies), .ac.at (for universities) and .gv.at (for governmental institutions). It’s only as of 1997 that it was possible to register directly under .at.

The growing commercial interest in the Internet had let to the creation of 30.000 domains and pushed the University of Vienna and the Internet Service Providers Austria (ISPA) to professionalise the domain management. They founded nic.at – the Austrian Domain Registry – in 1998. Today, nic.at has done this job for 20 years and is looking after 1,23 million .at domains.

In parallel to founding nic.at, ISPA founded Stopline, the Austrian report centre against child pornography and national socialism on the Internet. In order to run Stopline, nic.at is closely cooperating with ISPA and has processed over 65.000 reports of conscious Internet users.

The social commitment of nic.at peaked at the next milestone in 2008: the Austrian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT.at) was founded together with The Austrian Federal Chancellery. Ten years into its work, CERT.at has become indispensable for the Austrian IT-Security community. The CERT.at experts are highly valued within and outside of Austria.

„We are very happy to support the Austrian Internet Community and will continue to contribute to a safe and stable Internet infrastructure in Austria“, Richard Wein and Robert Schischka assert.