BERLIN — Berlin’s municipal website may not be new, but it’s found itself a new home. After going online at a “dot org” address when town first incorporated in 2018, the site has packed its bags and changed addresses, taking up residence at a new, more official “dot gov” domain.

At the town’s regular council meeting Monday, Berlin mayor Patrick Bates (whose day job just so happens to be in Information Technology) informed the council the town had been approved for the move after submitting the relevant registration info to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security).

The town’s new official web address is www.berlinal.gov — though thanks to some behind-the-scenes tweaking by Bates, guests who visit the old address at www.berlinal.org won’t hazard getting lost: They’ll simply be redirected to the new address with nary a stumble.

The address change marks a small but significant distinction: By law, the “dot gov” domain is reserved only for municipal government entities, and requires verification through a federal registration process.

But why did Berlin decide to make the switch now, rather than at the time the town first set up its website? Because CISA decided last year it would no longer charge a fee to municipalities that seek a “dot gov” top-level domain.

In internet-speak, a top-level domain is represented by the familiar series of letters — usually three, like “.com” or “.org” — at the end of a web address. In the hierarchy of internet address naming convention, it serves as the highest-level destination in the Domain Name System (DNS) established in the late 1990s by the U.S.-based nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which referees the global public network’s enormous and labyrinthine database structure of internet-reliant names and numbers.

Berlin isn’t the only local government to take advantage of the federal government’s new no-fee policy, which Bates said saves the town a small — but not negligible — sum of a few hundred dollars in registration fees. The City of Cullman made the move back before CISA took over the federal government’s oversight role, which before 2021 had been the task of the General Services Administration.

In addition to saving a little money on fees, there’s at least one solid security reason for municipal entities to reside at a “dot gov” web address. By visiting a “dot gov” site, internet guests who head online to track down cities, towns, state and county governments, and all their myriad agencies can rest assured that the site they’re visiting is the real deal, rather than a privately-operated impostor.