Registrations are reserved for museums, museums associations and identified museum professionals. The ".museum" domain name may only be used for museum purposes and the domain name has to be identical to the name of the museum.

A museum, or group of museums, wishing to register a domain name for a temporary or traveling exhibition or similar event, may do so if the domain name is clearly derived from the name of that exhibition or event.

A .museum name must specifically designate the entity to which it is assigned. A name containing only two labels may not contain a generic term or a location designation as the second-level label. If a generic term is used on the second level, an additional label must be used on the third-level to provide the necessary specificity.

An individual museum may register multiple domain names in two label forms, and in three (or more) label forms using different generic labels to indicate discipline, location, and further generic categories

In order to register a name in .museum, an applicant must have a Community-ID. This identifies you as a member of the museum community when dealing with a registrar. Note that the applicants receives a list of reserved domain names if the Community-ID is registered. If the applicant has a Community-ID he of she has to supply this ID and password and has to tell which domain name the applicant wants to register. If this is done the domain name will be registered.

- start and end with an alphanumeric character, not a dash.
- do not contain a dash on the 3rd and 4th position (tagged domains).
- contain letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), hyphenss (-) and IDNS supported charaters. Characters from the Latin and Hebrew scripts are current available. However, the registry wants to expand this with Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic and Greek scripts.

Registering a domain name solely for the purposes of selling, trading or leasing the domain name for compensation; or the unsolicited offering to sell, trade or lease the domain name for compensation; or permitting the domain name to be used on any terms whatsoever by any organization, institution or individual other than the one to which it is registered, shall not constitute genuine museum use of that domain name even if one or more parties in any of these cases is a genuine museum.

.museum is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used exclusively by museums, museum associations, and individual members of the museum profession, as these groups are defined by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). In joint action with the J. Paul Getty Trust, ICOM established the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma), headed by Cary Karp, for the purpose of submitting an application to ICANN for the creation of the new gTLD, and to operate it if the application was approved. The .museum domain was entered into the root of Domain Name System on 20 October 2001, and was the first sponsored top-level domain to be instituted through ICANN's action.

The idea behind this domain is that it will be beneficial for Internet users to have a segment of the TLD namespace reserved for the use of museums; a namespace whose conventions are defined by the museum community. The .museum TLD will grant users a quick and intuitive way to verify the authenticity of a museum site. Conversely, since it is a type of formal third-party certification, museums using this namespace obtain a way to assure visitors of the site's validity.

In addition to the eligibility requirements specified in the .museum charter, a number of naming conventions apply to the labeling of subdomains. Extensive support is also being introduced for internationalized domain names, as described at about.museum.

If you want to move your .museum domain to Networking4all, you should contact your current registrar and request to send the Domain Authorization Code (also referred to as a authcode, Authinfo code or transfer code). This code is assigned by the registrar. Authorization Codes are the password for the domain and serve as an additional safety measure. The verification codes ensure that only the domain name owner can relocate the domain.