Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Eric Brunner-Williams brunner at nic-naa.net
Tue Oct 21 02:34:22 UTC 2014


at ietf-9 jon and i discussed the problem solved (scaling of the zone 
editor function as the price of network interfaces dropped by orders of 
magnitude) by reliance upon iso3166-1, and the problems created by 
reliance upon iso3166-1. the economic success of .cat (unique among the 
icann 1st and 2nd round gtld projects) and the orders of magnitude 
growth of catalan (as measured by google) as the detected or announced 
language of network accessible content are facts. [note, as cto of the 
.cat project i'd no way of knowing either outcome would arise.]

i remain of the view that language and culture, and fate independence 
from the vgrs business model are sufficient to expand on the 1591 set of 
namespaces.

-e

On 10/20/14 3:09 PM, manning bill wrote:
> FNC “reserved” .gov and .mil for the US.
>
> And Postel was right… there was/is near zero reason to technically extend/expand the number of TLDs.
>
> /bill
> PO Box 12317
> Marina del Rey, CA 90295
> 310.322.8102
>
> On 20October2014Monday, at 12:19, Sandra Murphy <sandy at tislabs.com> wrote:
>
>> By the time of RFC1591, March 1994, authored by Jon Postel, said:
>>
>> GOV - This domain was originally intended for any kind of government
>>          office or agency.  More recently a decision was taken to
>>          register only agencies of the US Federal government in this
>>          domain.
>>
>> No reference as to who, when, or how.
>>
>> That same RFC says:
>>
>>    In the Domain Name System (DNS) naming of computers there is a
>>    hierarchy of names.  The root of system is unnamed.  There are a set
>>    of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs).  These are the
>>    generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two
>>    letter country codes from ISO-3166.  It is extremely unlikely that
>>    any other TLDs will be created.
>>
>> Gotta love that last sentence, yes?
>>
>> --Sandy
>>
>> On Oct 20, 2014, at 12:50 PM, Fred Baker (fred) <fred at cisco.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Oct 19, 2014, at 5:05 AM, Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Wondering if some of the long-time list members
>>>> can shed some light on the question--why is the
>>>> .gov top level domain only for use by US
>>>> government agencies?  Where do other world
>>>> powers put their government agency domains?
>>>>
>>>> With the exception of the cctlds, shouldn't the
>>>> top-level gtlds be generically open to anyone
>>>> regardless of borders?
>>>>
>>>> Would love to get any info about the history
>>>> of the decision to make it US-only.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>>>
>>>> Matt
>>> The short version is that that names were a process. In the beginning, hosts simply had names. When DNS came into being, names were transformed from “some-name” to “some-name.ARPA”. A few of what we now all gTLDs then came into being - .com, .net, .int, .mil, .gov, .edu - and the older .arpa names quickly fell into disuse.
>>>
>>> ccTLDs came later.
>>>
>>> I’ve been told that the reason God was able to create the earth in seven days was that He had no installed base. We do. The funny thing is that you’ll see a reflection of the gTLDs underneath the ccTLDs of a number of countries - .ac, .ed, and the like.
>
>
>




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