Is the .to (Tonga) domain completely rogue and should be removed?

Thu Oct 1 12:41:11 UTC 1998

Thus spake Barry Shein
> On September 30, 1998 at 20:03 darcy at druid.net (D'Arcy J. M. Cain) wrote:
>  > >  > All that proves is someone has a sense of humor.  I've seen plenty of
>  > > No I think it indicates that a bunch of clowns have taken over what
>  > Actually, it proves that they are running the Juniper SMTP and haven't
> Well, maybe you missed the part about the website for the San
> Francisco Consulate of the Kingdom of Tonga (which the US State Dept
> lists as their official presence in the US) being an advertisement for
> a software company.

Uh, no.  All I was trying to do was add a little information to the
discussion.  If I had known nothing about Juniper but knew something
that explained why you saw an ad on the website I would have addressed
that issue.  I wasn't even arguing for or against your position.  All I
was trying to do was correct a factual error.

> It was all part of a picture that the .to domain may have ceased to
> serve as a country TLD for the Kingdom of Tonga.

And as I tried to point out, part of the picture was false.  Those
messages are the standard ones that come with a particular SMTP daemon.
Not that I am suggesting that there would be something wrong with
having a sense of humour but in this case it was simply a more or less
blind software install.

> What if a country ceased to exist entirely and the domain they were
> using was hijacked by some random, unrelated entity for their own
> malicious purposes? Would that justify decommissioning the TLD

I don't know.  I'm not the one making these decisions.  Are you?

> (meaning, removing it from the root servers)?

Ok, no need to be patronizing.  I think everyone here knows what you mean.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@{druid|vex}.net>   |  Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/                |  and a sheep voting on
+1 416 424 2871     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.