Re: TLDs & identity

[Simon Higgs <simon@higgs.com>]

At 8:00 PM -0500 11/24/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> Simon Higgs writes:
> > Reasoning: it will happen eventually, so we might as well prepare for
> > it. Plus there are two existing TLDs that already qualify - .GOV (US
> > Government) & .MIL (US Military). Some might argue that they are
> > insignificant organizations in the grand scheme of things (which may be
> > true), but they already have TLDs.
>
> That may be regarded in some ways as a historical accident. Were
> things being done afresh today, the U.S. Government would probably
> have domains under .GOV.US and under .MIL.US or something similar. The
> fact that we have any organizationally limited TLDs at all is because
> when the DNS was created the internet was still almost entirely a
> U.S. based network with only a tiny set of outposts in the U.K.
>

So place them both under .US now. It can still be done.

> Personally, I am not in favor of creating any new TLDs in the future
> that are for the exclusive use of a single organization.

Several organizations on the WIPO list already qualify in such a way
that prevents anyone else from using those names as TLDs. Eventually
one of them will wake up and put in a TLD request. If you want to deny
them a TLD later, you have to put .MIL and .GOV under .US now before
it's too late.

> They do not ease registration problems; they do not ease technical problems.
> All they do is flatten the namespace, which I do not regard as a goal.
>

That's a completely false assumption. If you delegate ".IBM" to IBM,
there are no registration or technical problems for the internet
community. There are no public fee issues. They are ALL IBM's internal
problems. So their name server(s) don't respond. Big deal, then they're
invisible just like any other TLD.


Simon

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