Re: Hijacked Domain Names?

[Hank Nussbacher <hank@ibm.net.il>]

On Thu, 21 Nov 1996, David R. Conrad wrote:

> > Recall that no government or inter-
> > national body gave Internic the right
> > to any of the TLD's they appear to own.
> 
> Try again.  InterNIC was established by the US government (the
> National Science Foundation) to provide (among other things) DNS
> allocation and registration services, it can at the very least, be
> said that the US government supports InterNIC in operating those
> zones.

Better to ask: Since TCP/IP started with ARPA and since IANA handed
off the TLD area to the NSF which contracted out to the NSF, where was
it stated that the US govt had to open the .COM domain to organizations
not in the USA?  The NSF can argue that they did a favor to non USA based
companies by allowing them to register in what was perhaps intended to
be a USA only namespace.  They opened up ISO 3166 domains for each country
to manage.  Is the NSF and the US govt required by any sort of contract
from the "world" to register non-USA based domains?

I am being specifically argumentative above.  I do not agree with the 
above view but it could be argued in rebuttel to the statement that
no one gave the right to the Internic to any iTLDs.

> 
> Regards,
> -drc
> 

Hank Nussbacher
IAHC member
[the views expressed above belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the other IAHC members]