Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Tue Oct 21 05:44:14 UTC 2014

> On Oct 20, 2014, at 9:30 PM, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Oct 21, 2014, at 9:23 AM, Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net> wrote:
> 
>> Breaking tons of things is an interesting opinion of "why not”.
> 
> Eh.  Off the top of my head, I see two categories of breakage:
> 
>   1) things that hard-code a list of “real” TLDs, and break when their expectations aren’t met, and 
> 
>   2) things that went ahead and trumped up their own non-canonical TLDs for their own purposes.
> 
> Neither of those seem like practices worth defending, to me.  Not worth going out of one’s way to break, either, but…
> 
> And in the latter case, like “alternate roots,” that’s not an argument against creating more TLDs…  They’ve already been created.  It’s an argument against doing so in an uncoordinated manner, which is the source of the breakage.

I’ve had operational issues introduced by *TLD operators and choices they made.  I’m not going to document them here, but by using the root zone as a dumping ground for vanity addresses (e.g.: .google) highlights something that can be properly dealt with through normal processes.

The number of things which will change from a predictable result to a unpredictable result (similar to when someone decided to wildcard .com) will continue to increase.

Thankfully we can now receive email from spammer at example.google as it properly resolves and validates(!).  (this is just one example).

- Jared