Re: Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

[Sandra Murphy <sandy () tislabs com>]

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) <fred () cisco com> wrote:

> On Oct 19, 2014, at 5:05 AM, Matthew Petach <mpetach () 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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