Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Tue Oct 21 03:54:04 UTC 2014

On 10/20/14 4:07 PM, shawn wilson wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.us> wrote:
>
>> 3. Set a target date for the removal of those TLDs for 10 years in the
>> future
>>
>
> Because this worked for IPv6?

Actually it worked really well for IPv6 in USG-space. It also mostly 
worked for DNSSEC. Orgs that didn't make the deadline got spanked, and 
remediated.

Of course DNSSEC in GOV has been a mixed bag, but to be fair, that's 
true of all the early adopters.

>> Obviously there are various implementation details for effecting the move,
>> but application-layer stuff will be as obvious to most readers as it is
>> off-topic for this list.
>>
>
> In this case, it's all about the "application-layer stuff" - that'd be
> the stuff to fail hard - mainframe IP gateways, control systems,
> Lotus, Domino, etc. BIND is fine. Even most of the PHP apps would
> (should, maybe) be fine. But that's not runs most of the gov.

No argument, which is why the long tail. A non-trivial amount of that 
stuff will go away by attrition over a decade, and the rest will just 
have to be moved carefully.

>> Regarding the time period in #3, decommissioning a TLD is harder than you
>> might think, and we have plenty of extant examples of others that have taken
>> longer, and/or haven't finished yet *cough*su*cough*.
>>
>
> Do we really have any prior examples that are even .1 the size of the
> usgov public system? Again, I'm not just referring to BIND and Windows
> DNS (and probably some Netware 4 etc stuff) - this would be web, soap
> parsers, email systems, vpn, and all of their clients (public,
> contractor, and gov). Anything close to what y'all are talking about?

Actually I think I could make a very convincing argument that GOV would 
not be the most challenging problem of the 3 I mentioned, but I won't. :)

The question here is not, "Is it easy?" The questions are, "Is it the 
right thing to do?" and "Will it get easier to do tomorrow than it would 
have been to do today?"

I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would have been easier 
to do a decade ago, and 10 years from now it will be harder still.

Doug