Re: TLDs & identity

["Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>]

.gov and .mil are just plain special cases.  Look at any Olympic opening or
closing ceremony.  What flags do you see most prominently?  The host nation
flag, the Olypic flag, and the Greek flag.  Why?  Becasue Greece started the
Olympic games.  Maybe there are some people unhappy about this but no one
things this special prominence of the Greek flag at the Olympics is going to
go away.  Similarly, .gov and .mil exist due to historic accident and the
initial development and funding of the early Internet by the US Government
Department of Defense.  I just don't see any reason strong enough to disturb
.mil and .gov, given the an important purpose of the DNS is to provide stable
names and I don't see any reason to consider them to extablish any sort of
precedent for new single organization names. 

Donald

On Sun, 24 Nov 1996, Simon Higgs wrote:

> Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 18:23:59 -0800
> From: Simon Higgs <simon@higgs.com>
> To: perry@piermont.com
> Cc: iahc-discuss@iahc.org
> Subject: Re: TLDs & identity
> 
> 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.
> 
> ...
> 
> Simon
=====================================================================
Donald E. Eastlake 3rd     +1 508-287-4877(tel)     dee@cybercash.com
   318 Acton Street        +1 508-371-7148(fax)     dee@world.std.com
Carlisle, MA 01741 USA     +1 703-620-4200(main office, Reston, VA)
http://www.cybercash.com           http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html