Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Mon Oct 20 23:20:19 UTC 2014

I remember asking this same question when I first started managing DNS records in the early 1990s.  Being young and unencumbered by "it's always been done this way" thinking I believed that it would only be a few years of transition and .mil/.gov would be pushed to the history books.  Now I'm older and crankier and a grandfather.  Along with asking the "who cares?" question the image of Grandpa Simpson also comes to mind:  "GET OFF MY LAWN!"

Marc

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Doug Barton
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 6:26 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

On 10/19/14 5:05 AM, Matthew Petach 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?

... I think these questions have been adequately answered.

In regards to the question of "Ok, so what do we do about it?" a simple plan was floated oh, about a decade ago:

1. Create edu.us, gov.us, and mil.us

2. Lock out all new registrations in EDU, GOV, and MIL

3. Set a target date for the removal of those TLDs for 10 years in the future

Obviously there are various implementation details for effecting the move, but application-layer stuff will be as obvious to most readers as it is off-topic for this list.

Regarding the time period in #3, decommissioning a TLD is harder than you might think, and we have plenty of extant examples of others that have taken longer, and/or haven't finished yet *cough*su*cough*.

Obviously no serious consideration was given to that plan 10 years ago, or we wouldn't still be having the conversation today. :)  Meanwhile what most perceive as the USG's privileged position in the operation of the root zone is still being reinforced by those TLDs, in spite of the current IANA stewardship transition talks.

Doug