Wow, I didn't realise it was this old:
> The URL had been registered back in 1999, before 2001 regulations restricted the “.edu” designation to accredited higher educational institutions. “[D]espite its misleading top level domain,” noted Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2015), head of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, “Academia.edu is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com.” Like other prior domain filings, Academia.edu was grandfathered in, granting the startup a time-sealed patina of nonprofit credibility