Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Jimmy Hess mysidia at gmail.com
Sun Oct 19 13:13:10 UTC 2014


On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:

> But to make a long story short, and my memory's perhaps a bit rusty
> now, but my recollection is that shorter URL's looked nicer and there
> was significant money to be had running the registry, so there was
> some heavy lobbying against retiring .GOV in favor of .FED.US (and
> other .US locality domains).
[snip]

The same problem exists with .EDU capriciously adopting new criteria
that excludes any non-US-based institutions from being eligible.   I
believe the major issue is that if a TLD is in the global namespace,
then it should NOT be allowed to restrict registrations based on
country;   the internet is global and  .GOV and .EDU are in Global
Namespace.

So then, why aren't  .EDU and .GOV just  allowed to continue to exist
but a community decision made to require   whichever registry will be
contracted to manage .GOV to accept  registrations from _all_
government entities  regardless of nationality  ?

In otherwords, rejection of the idea that a registry operating GTLD
namespace can be allowed to impose overly exclusive "eligibility
criteria"


> ... JG

-- 
-JH



More information about the NANOG mailing list