Christopher Martin wrote:
And, lastly, as much as US citizens hate to hear it, .org is NOT a US
domain, .org.us is. The .com, .org, etc domains are international domains.
The convention of assuming that the non country coded domains are US domains
is simply a result of American hubris. It would actually be great to see
international domains be means tested (you have to have offices in two or
more countries before you can get one), but I would assume that the
bitchfest that would ensue wouldn't be worth it. That's my 2 cents, anyway.
Trimmed for brevity.
Just as a FYI, .com, .org, .edu, .mil, .gov, and .net were developed by
the US when DNS was first being conceptualized. There were enough
computers on the (D)ARPNET backbone that it was getting confusing to
track hosts files. At that point, there wasn't a .us, .au, .gb, .de, or
the others. Those came slightly later.
All .edu meant was 'educational institution'(involved in defense
research to start). .com was 'commercial entity' (specifically involved
in defense contracting), .org was 'undetermined or non-profit
organization'(same), and .net meant 'network services provider'(not
really sure if this was used much before the 90's). (paraphrasing, of
course)
However, since the US government deregulated their control over the
Internet in the mid 1990's (I was at university at that point, I
remember the hooraw over it. The concept of regular people being able
to get domain names was flabbergasting) and created INTERNIC
(Internic.net, for example, was created in 1993. netsol.com was also 1993.
uh.edu, however (the University of Houston) was created in 1987.
purdue.edu (Purdue University) was created in 1985. Boeing.com -
1986. ibm.com - 1986. dec.com - 1985. Harvard and Cornell - 1985.
Quoted from http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/tld.html -
".EDU, .INT, .MIL and .GOV have restrictive conditions on who can
register names in those domains (respectively, four-year degree granting
institutions in North America, organisations that were established by
international treaty, the USA military, and the USA federal government)"
ccTLD's, it seems, weren't much used until 1993, nor widely used until
the late 1990's -
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/04background-on-iso-3166/iso3166-past-present-and-future.html
(Now, I remember mailing to friends at .au universities while gaming in
the early 1990's, so they were in use. I just don't remember seeing
many other than western Europe, eastern Asia and Australia, and North
America, until 1993-1994 - then the Estonians erupted on the scene -
talk about 'newbies')
So therefore, yes, .org, .net, .com and .edu are, on the whole, US
domains. .net, .org, and .com, however, were sort of 'thrown open' to
anyone after the mid 1990's. Trying to call them 'international',
however, is a bit silly.
BW
