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) <f...@cisco.com> wrote: > > On Oct 19, 2014, at 5:05 AM, Matthew Petach <mpet...@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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