.info was born in ICANN's highly publicized announcement in late 2000 of a phased release of seven new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The event was billed as the first addition of major gTLDs to the Internet since the DNS was developed in the 1980s. The seven new gTLDs, selected from over 180 proposals, were meant in part to take the pressure off the overcrowded .com domain.
.info is an unrestricted domain, meaning anyone can obtain a second-level domain under .info. You don't have to be a library, for example. You could be someone masquerading as an information source but really targeting and exploiting a market. This is in contrast to a TLD such as .edu or .coop, which comes with criteria.
The .info domain has been operated since its creation by Afilias.
