Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Mon Oct 20 06:27:00 UTC 2014

On 10/19/14 10:32 AM, John Levine wrote:
# Gee, someone should alert NANOG management that the list has fallen
# through a wormhole into 1996.
#

On 10/19/14 12:51 PM, David Conrad wrote:
> RFC 1591.
>
Which is circa 1994.

The real answer is that although fed.us is used by some agencies,
the overall requirement was stripped out of the Telecommunications
Act of 1996.  Basically, the DC area incumbent provider of .gov and
.com was making so insanely much money per registration, they were
able to <s>buy off</s> persuade enough politicians to keep their
monopolistic status.

Slowly, slowly, technical progress (Google) and cooperative
agreements have eroded that "land grab" into an oligopoly instead.