NAVYJOBS.COM

Mon Apr 22 19:06:24 UTC 1996

> I was happily watching the hockey playoffs just now
> (well, as happily as possible without Hockey Night in Canada),
> and noticed a commercial for U.S. Navy Recruiting.
> 
> Why why why why why are they in .COM?!
> 
> I think we should be told.
> 
> 	Sean.

The Navy Recruiting web site, and all the other Navy Recruiting stuff -
print, TV, radio, etc - is produced by an advertising agency. Apparently
a lot of the Navy recruiting effort is out sourced.

While I did not contribute to the decision making with regard to the
choice of domain (it was decided before the agency awarded the hosting
contract to us), I asked the people here who work with the agency on
the contract if they knew why the agency decided on a .com domain
instead of a .mil or .gov. So what follows is hearsay...

Apparently there was a lot of consideration given to the domain name for
the web site and after some debate over using the existing navy.mil 
or a new .com it was decided to go with a new .com domain. Aside from
the complications arising from getting the navy's cooperation with regard
to having a commercial organization running a web site in the navy.mil
domain from a technical standpoint, from the ad agencies point of view
there was a desire to keep the recruiting web site operations as
separate from any military operations as possible for a bunch of
logistical and bureaucratic reasons.

John Riordan
Interport Communications Corp.