[175335] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why is .gov only for US government agencies?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sandra Murphy)
Mon Oct 20 15:19:09 2014
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Sandra Murphy <sandy@tislabs.com>
In-Reply-To: <648FFDA5-31F1-4DB6-8D9B-03AE708FCDAC@cisco.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 15:19:00 -0400
To: "Fred Baker (fred)" <fred@cisco.com>, "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Cc: Sandra Murphy <sandy@tislabs.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
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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:
>=20
> On Oct 19, 2014, at 5:05 AM, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> =
wrote:
>=20
>> 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?
>>=20
>> With the exception of the cctlds, shouldn't the
>> top-level gtlds be generically open to anyone
>> regardless of borders?
>>=20
>> Would love to get any info about the history
>> of the decision to make it US-only.
>>=20
>> Thanks!
>>=20
>> Matt
>=20
> 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 =93some-name=94 to =93some-name.ARPA=94. 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.=20
>=20
> ccTLDs came later.
>=20
> I=92ve 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=92ll see a reflection of the gTLDs underneath the ccTLDs of a =
number of countries - .ac, .ed, and the like.
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