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MIT faces less competition for ... MIT

The battle for the letters “MIT” is fierce, but one source of competition for those letters looks out of the running, at least for now.

According to an article in Focus Taiwan last week, Taiwan-operated businesses in mainland China will be required to label their products “Made in China,” rather than “MIT,” or “Made in Taiwan.”

MIT has seen competition in the past from Meritt Island Technologies, of Meritt Island, Florida, which had previously registered mit.com. MIT’s network manager, Jeffrey I. Schiller ’79, currently holds that domain name in reserve. We imagine the behind-the-scenes negotiations may have been fierce.

MIT has even seen competition from the German language. A Google search for “MIT” claims one billion results, but a sizable quantity of those are the German word mit, meaning “with.” (A Google search for “MIT German” returns 48 million results, which is certainly a lower bound on the number of results that are in the German language.)

The Turkish National Intelligence Organiation, or Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı, is also known as MİT, though they seem to appear less frequently in casual conversation.

Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, RMIT, ocassionally gets confused with MIT, especially in its domain name, rmit.edu.au, since it contains the substring mit.edu.

There are several other educational institutions that may use the initials MIT, including the Manipal Institute of Technology, Machakos Institute of Technology, Madras Institute of Technology Chromepet, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Manukau Institute of Technology, Mapúa Institute of Technology, Melbourne Institute of Technology, Milwaukee Institute of Technology, Muroran Institute of Technology, and Musashi Institute of Technology. Wow, that’s a mouthful!