Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Mon Oct 20 19:19:00 UTC 2014

By the time of RFC1591, March 1994, authored by Jon Postel, said:

GOV - This domain was originally intended for any kind of government
         office or agency.  More recently a decision was taken to
         register only agencies of the US Federal government in this
         domain.

No reference as to who, when, or how.

That same RFC says:

   In the Domain Name System (DNS) naming of computers there is a
   hierarchy of names.  The root of system is unnamed.  There are a set
   of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs).  These are the
   generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two
   letter country codes from ISO-3166.  It is extremely unlikely that
   any other TLDs will be created.

Gotta love that last sentence, yes?

--Sandy

On Oct 20, 2014, at 12:50 PM, Fred Baker (fred) <fred at cisco.com> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 19, 2014, at 5:05 AM, Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com> wrote:
> 
>> Wondering if some of the long-time list members
>> can shed some light on the question--why is the
>> .gov top level domain only for use by US
>> government agencies?  Where do other world
>> powers put their government agency domains?
>> 
>> With the exception of the cctlds, shouldn't the
>> top-level gtlds be generically open to anyone
>> regardless of borders?
>> 
>> Would love to get any info about the history
>> of the decision to make it US-only.
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> Matt
> 
> The short version is that that names were a process. In the beginning, hosts simply had names. When DNS came into being, names were transformed from “some-name” to “some-name.ARPA”. A few of what we now all gTLDs then came into being - .com, .net, .int, .mil, .gov, .edu - and the older .arpa names quickly fell into disuse. 
> 
> ccTLDs came later.
> 
> I’ve been told that the reason God was able to create the earth in seven days was that He had no installed base. We do. The funny thing is that you’ll see a reflection of the gTLDs underneath the ccTLDs of a number of countries - .ac, .ed, and the like.

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