[62] in North American Network Operators' Group

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

Re: US Domain -- County Delegations

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul A Vixie)
Fri Jul 28 03:20:37 1995

To: nanog@merit.edu, usdomreg@isi.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 27 Jul 1995 23:44:26 PDT."
             <Pine.LNX.3.91.950727233242.29536B-100000@okjunc.junction.net> 
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 00:02:00 -0700
From: Paul A Vixie <paul@vix.com>

> but they all get nice short names. And the folks at Green Auto Parts in 
> Raleigh NC can still register as green.com.nc.us and they will be quite 
> happy since they only have 10 machines on their store LAN.

but they won't.  they'll want green.biz.  if you were right that they'd be
quite happy, then our local newspaper would have called their domain
SF-EXAMINER.COM rather than EXAMINER.COM.  but they were almost certainly
worried that if they didn't take EXAMINER.COM, some other daily newspaper
would surely take it, and they'd somehow be worse off.

we're getting well into the murky arena where perception begins to dominate
the equation.  people _believe_ that short domain names indicate quality or
size or "greatness" (i call this "domain envy"), and so it becomes true.

it's sort of like thin-vs-wide ties, or hemlines.  i'm not sure that we as
technologists are well equipped to deal with this issue, but i am quite
certain that the nontechnologists would do an even worst job, so here we are.

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post