WorldNIC

Wed Jun 10 19:05:25 UTC 1998

Eric Germann wrote:
> At 09:53 AM 6/10/98 -0700, Michael Dillon wrote:
> >The MITRE Corporation registered mitre.org in 1985 and the Aerospace
> >Corporation registered aero.org in 1987. This idea that .ORG was only for
> >non-profit organizations is an example of historical revisionism
> >propogated by people who were not there at the time the TLDs were created.
> 
> Well, if one draws ones references from "DNS and BIND" (First Edition) by
> Albitz and Liu, which is widely accepted as a definitive resource on DNS,
> on page 21, the refer to .org as "Non-commercial organizations, like the
> Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org)".  This is further propogated in
> the Second Edition on page 18.
> 
> RFC 1591 which defines it as a miscellaneous TLD came along two years later.
> 
> RFC 920 (1984) defines it for domains that don't fall under the .COM, .NET,
> .GOV, etc, singling out commercial entities for .COM exclusively.  That
> kinda leaves .org for noncommercials by inference.

Well, yes, but RFC1366 also says hosts with >32 subnets and 4096 hosts
qualify for a Class B.  :)

When I want to go back and look at "what used to be" (the good old days)
I grab my red book.  I got it from SRI.. they published it in 1992.

They list:

COM
This is the domain for commercial businesses and organizations that make a
profit through a service or sale a product[sic]. This is the largest
top-level domain.

EDU
This domain is for degree-granting educational institutions, such as colleges;
universities; community colleges; libraries; research institutes;
astronomical observatories; (blah blah).

GOV
This domain is for non-military national government organizations, e.g.
Veterans Administration, Department of Energy, national laboaratories such
as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  State governments also fit under
this domain at the second-level, e.g. CA.GOV or HAWAII.GOV.  State agencies
should be registered at the third level, e.g. WATER-DEPARTMENT.CA.GOV[...]

MIL
This is the domain for U.S. military organizations. [...]

NET
This is the domain for backbone systems - NICs, NOCs, gateways, etc.  Only
machines necessary for the actual operation of the network can be registered
within this domain.

ORG
This is the domain for not-for-profit organizations.  Any profit-making
organization does not belong in this domain.  It is also for technical-
support groups; professional societies and associations; and computer
users' groups.  ORG also exists as a parent to subdomains that do not
clearly fall under the other top-level domains.

US
The US domain is a top-level domain created for people in the US who have
computers at home, or small local corporations who wanted to register their
hosts geographically.

> Then again, there used to be a requirement to have OPERATIONAL name servers
> when registering a domain, but that seems to have gotten historically
> revised away also when $$$ entered the picture.  But I digress...

Yeah. I actually talked with someone this AM about that.  I think I'm
going to walk the DNS again to look for lame servers. I'll post a summary
here whenever I get around to doing it. :)

-jamie
/12-line sigfile deleted
-- 
jamie rishaw (dal/efnet:gavroche)           American Information Systems, Inc.
     rdm: "Religion is obsolete."   gsr: "By what?"  jgr: "Solaris." (1996)
                    Tel:312.425.7140, FAX:312.425.7240