Namespace conflicts

Fri Mar 9 17:21:50 UTC 2001

> On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 09:10:09AM -0500, Steven M. Bellovin mailed:
> > In my area of NJ, virtually every town's "obvious" .com domain names were 
> > grabbed by one of two competing would-be service providers.  They had 
> > absolutely no town-specific content -- but if the town wanted a Web 
> > site, they had no choice but to deal with these folks.  I have no major 
> > problem with first-come, first-served *productive* use of a domain name,
> > but frankly, that's not where the problem has been.  The problem has 
> > been speculators and cybersquatters.
> 
> Uh, why couldn't the town just use <name>.nj.us or whatever the city specific
> code was long ago and far way.

No.  However, they could use ci.<name>.nj.us, and that's where I usually go
if I'm looking for a particular city's web site.

The reason for this distinction is to support things like:

	ci.alameda.ca.us	City of Alameda
	co.alameda.ca.us	County of Alameda
	joesshoes.alameda.ca.us	Joe's Shoe Shop in Alameda, CA

etc.  There's an RFC that spells all this out (1680 comes to mind, but not
sure that's the right number).

Owen