Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Tue Oct 21 04:03:49 UTC 2014

On 10/20/14 7:47 PM, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
> having written the technical portion of winning proposal to ntia for the
> .us zone, i differ.

The plan I outlined was discussed about 2 years after Neustar took over 
management, and TMK was never actually discussed with Neustar.

> as i recall, having done the research, in the year prior to the ntia's
> tender some six people held some 40% of the major metro area subordinate
> namespaces. to my chagrin, relieved by a notice of termination days
> before my stock in the company vested, the winner adopted a
> "orange-black" model, deprecating the namespace's existing hierarchical
> registration model for a flat registration model.

Yes, but the locality-based name space still exists. I used to hold some 
names under it, but gave them up when I moved out of state. Meanwhile, 
several states actively use their name space. But ...

> the registration process model for .us is dissimilar to the registration
> process models of .edu, .mil and .gov, as are the contractors to the
> government.

... none of this is relevant to the proposal at hand. Neustar manages 
the domain on behalf of the USG. There is nothing preventing them from 
changing the way it is used, and the 10 year period I proposed takes 
runout of existing contracts into account (since EDU, GOV, and MIL would 
need continued operation during that period anyway).

Doug