Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

Tue Oct 21 15:08:09 UTC 2014

On Oct 20, 2014, at 10:18 PM, Barry Shein <bzs at world.std.com> wrote:
> Not that anyone is looking for a solution but I suppose one possible
> solution would be to use the two-letter cctld then gov like
> parliament.uk.gov or parliament.ca.gov etc.
> 
> No doubt there would be some collisions but probably not too serious.

Folks outside of the US have issues with the US government having a role in the administration of the root, even if that role is to ensure ICANN does screw the pooch. Having country governments use <country code>.GOV would, assuming .GOV was still managed by the USG, give the US government vastly greater and more direct control of the country's government's websites (not to mention a lovely source of metadata associated with lookups of those websites).  Moving .GOV away from USG control is both wildly unlikely and pointless, particularly in a world of 400+ (and counting) TLDs.

AFAIK, reasons why the FNC decided to assert GOV and MIL were to be US-only were probably because the USG had already been using it, the operational value of switching would be low while the cost would've been high, some other governments were already using sub-domains within their ccTLDs, and/or it was seen as a good thing to encourage more ccTLD delegations and the use of those ccTLDs.  The fact that it gives some political folk ammunition to complain about how the Internet is "controlled" by the USG is merely a side benefit (to them).

Regards,
-drc

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