FNC “reserved” .gov and .mil for the US. And Postel was right… there was/is near zero reason to technically extend/expand the number of TLDs.
/bill PO Box 12317 Marina del Rey, CA 90295 310.322.8102 On 20October2014Monday, at 12:19, Sandra Murphy <sa...@tislabs.com> wrote: > 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. >
