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If you want worldwide you should use .INT that is what it was set aside for.

The top-level domain for international organizations is .ORG. The .INT TLD is designed for international treaty organizations such as ISO, WTO, WIPO, etc.

This was in the dark ages, when a popular top level domains was upkept by someone using a "vi" and who was rejecting domain names he disliked.

But I've heard they've upgraded to Windows Notepad.

This was in the dark ages, when a popular top level domains was upkept by someone using a "vi" and who was rejecting domain names he disliked.

But I've heard they've upgraded to Windows Notepad.

.us has been available for how long?

According to this the .us has been available since 15-February-1985, and according to this the .com has been available since 01-January-1985.

I don't think the 1½ month is pretty much according to your other arguments.

.us has been available for how long?

According to this the .us has been available since 15-February-1985, and according to this the .com has been available since 01-January-1985.

I don't think the 1½ month is pretty much according to your other arguments.

Formed in October 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit, private-sector corporation formed by a broad coalition of the Internet's business, technical, academic, and user communities. ICANN has been recognized by the U.S. and other governments as the global consensus entity to coordinate the technical management of the Internet's domain name system, the allocation of IP address space, the assignment of protocol parameters, and the management of the root server system.

As a technical coordinating body, ICANN's mandate is not to "run the Internet." Rather, it is to oversee the management of only those specific technical managerial and policy development tasks that require central coordination: the assignment of the Internet's unique name and number identifiers.

a router has a MAC in a different range

So yes, your router may have a MAC in a different range from your NIC, as will your neighbour's NIC (unless you use the ISP-provided NIC). Of course, if your NIC and router are both made by the same company (LinkSys, maybe?), they could have MACs in the same range.

NAT breaks peer-to-peer. You can't have a standard port, say, 1214, open on several NAT'd computers and expect them to communicate with multiple computers behind another NAT. You have to rely on the kludge of redirecting ports to local IPs! This totally defeats IANA Well-Known Port Assigments. Ack.

NAT may be fail-safe, but no more fail-safe than deny ip all, with appropriate accept lines letting the traffic you don't want in.

Funny you didn't mention .cx. But I guess they aren't as popular as when they were free to people other than Christmas Island residents.

Also .ws, not "web site", or "world site", Western Somoa. Oh and the newest of the bunch, .bz, has become popular because of .biz, which I'm sure makes Belize happy.

You can find all this at http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm.

Oh, and .io is much like .tk, but you have to pay for it.

But maybe you don't consider Stanford an educational institution.

Speaking of DEC... After it was announced that HP would buy Compaq, a rumour quickly spread that Apple would be acquired next. This is why.

Sealand is not on the list (which can be viewed at http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma /02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html).

ISO 3166 is the "authority" because that's what IANA decided (thus shifting the burden of recognizing nations to another standards-organization). See http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld.htm (where you'll find a link to IANA's decision enabling the .ps ccTLD for the Palestinian Territory). See also http://www.caslon.com.au/domainsprofile.htm

RFC 1591
The country codes are 2 letters. The codes come from IANA which refers to ISC country codes, so complain to ISO. Besides .sa and .se are taken. They could go to .oc (ocean), but who'd want that?

Some links to it:

RFC 741 - Specifications of Network Voice Protocol (from November 1977!)
Protocol Number Assignments

The Palestinian Authority did get an ISO 3166 country code and a top-level domain a couple years or so ago:
http://www.iana.org/reports/ps-report-22mar00.htm

Apparently they had palestine.int for a while. Link to .ps domain registration:
http://www.nic.ps/whois/index.php3

i shouldn't post prior to morning coffee - ccTLD list

"A few of the currently delegated ccTLDs do not appear on the ISO 3166-1 list. The United Kingdom was assigned the ccTLD .uk in the mid-1980s even though ISO 3166-1 calls for use of .gb. This assignment occurred before the IANA began using any standard list of country-code abbreviations. During a brief period in 1996, the IANA followed the policy of delegating ccTLDs not only from the ISO 3166-1 list but also from codes the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency had reserved specifically for purposes of the Universal Postal Union. That policy proved unsatisfactory and was quickly abandoned in favor of strict adherence to the ISO 3166-1 list. Finally, a few ccTLDs that were established from the ISO 3166-1 list were later deleted from that list. An example is the ccTLD for Zaire, .zr." (http://www.iana.org/reports/ps-report-22mar00.htm )
IMHO, UK is a better abreviation of "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" than GB is, but I'm not the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, so...

After some further reading, it seems that IANA's policy is to only issue TLDs for countries listed in the ISO 3166 country list, so a new TLD would not be allowed.

On the same page, you can also see some other applications for redelegation such as .JP, .CA, and .AU.

After some further reading, it seems that IANA's policy is to only issue TLDs for countries listed in the ISO 3166 country list, so a new TLD would not be allowed.

On the same page, you can also see some other applications for redelegation such as .JP, .CA, and .AU.

Each country's top-level domain is supposed to correspond to ISO 3166 country codes. To issue a new TLD to a country other than the correct ISO code would break the current system.

This would have to be a minor limitation, tho, and your suggestion should still be possible.

1. We grow bananas here. Besides, I did backspace over that stuff!
2. Someone seems to have confused Zaire with .za

For those with firewalls, be sure to block port 70, if you do not already.
Port number

Not sure if a user could redirect gopher to port 80, but at least this will lock out the script kiddies. Be on the lookout for html emails with this stuff. Count your blessings that MicroSoft has not been able to put all traffic on port 80 (yet), and you can still filter some things....

Almost, not quite.

ICANN stands for "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers". It is a non-profit set up a few years back to take over the duties of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

One of these is the clerical duty of assigning /8 blocks of global IPv4 address space and /16 blocks of IPv6 address space to each Regional Internet Registry as needed. The users of the address space decide policy, and it's this policy that the RIRs implement.

Another duty ICANN took over is maintenance of the DNS root (which has been the controversial part), and a third duty is maintenance of the list of protocol numbers (imagine a link to your /etc/services just here - something's stopping me posting triple-slash).

> .org's are supposed to be "non-profit!"

Like slashdot.org?

The .org domain is not restricted to non-profit organizations. The original domain rules stated that any "organization" could buy a .org domain. Besides, even if .org were reserved for non-profits, do you see profit here?

Why does WHOIS say that .gi is an invalid tld?

At the same time, it says that .tv is a valid tld.

The .tv domian is for the Republic of Tuvalu, and .gi is for Gibraltar. Why should WHOIS treat these domains differently?

Why does WHOIS say that .gi is an invalid tld?

At the same time, it says that .tv is a valid tld.

The .tv domian is for the Republic of Tuvalu, and .gi is for Gibraltar. Why should WHOIS treat these domains differently?

Their name servers are under the "IE" domain...

.ie = Ireland

Actually there is a .us TLD, but in the pre-international days, when the Internet truly was a US entity, the idea of country specific TLDs was unnecessary. However, the US hasn't "owned" .com or any other TLD (other than I believe .mil, .gov and .edu) for some time : These are international entities, and having a domain as a .com doesn't put it under "US control". If such was the case, the international community, which vastly outnumbers US citizens surfing the web, would have long replaced the root servers (you do realize how unbelievably trivial, and easily replacable, that the root DNS system is, don't you?)

Wrong!
IANA has assigned 80/tcp and 80/udp as the well-known port numbers for HTTP. See RFC 1700 or IANA port numbers .

-Kevin

I really don't get what these guys are supposed to be doing, or how it affects anyone when they do their job poorly. Their website, between bits of quorn like "Statement Concerning Schedule and Process for Consideration of Restructuring Proposal (28 February 2002)" seems to indicate all they do is make sure IP addresses, DNS names, and port numbers (!) are unique.

Is that really it? I thought IP addresses were done by IANA, are they part of ICANN? and isn't DNS registration (mis)handled by network solutions or whoever owns them these days?

So, i guess what i'm asking is, what would i miss if ICANN just went away and wasn't replaced by anything...?

--
Benjamin Coates

Not to nitpick, but:

.gov is for US Government only.
The TLD for Spain is .es

You can read up on country TLDs here.

Is that still true? Last I read they gave a large portion of their address space back... For all I know they could have kept a couple million though.

Did Intel get DEC's /8 when they bought Alpha from Compaq?

Most of the people I know haven't even upgraded to IPv5 yet!

Not really.
IRC, IPv4 was the first publicly aviable and IP (as defined in RFC760).
http://www.iana.org
IPv5 was taken by the ST-II protocol, which was supposed to be the next Internet Protocol (at least in the eyes of its inventors). But it was based on connection-oriented routing. This lead to a great resitance in the internet community, which is generally opposed to the idea of connections and channels.
It became experimental due to lack of support not by intend.

Have a look at the Version-numbers as assigned by the IANA.

For those to lazy to look it up.
IPv7 is the "TP/IX: The Next Internet"
IPv8 is "The P Internet Protocol"
IPv9 is "TUBA"

But some people are already joking that one will adopt an odd/even numbering scheme.

http://cr.yp.to/papers.html

Is it just me, or did I totally miss Tonga's rise to a leadership position in the crypto community? I didn't see it on their website...

P.S. When you guys fill out forms asking for an e-mail address, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not use domains like that. Someone owns them. Use "domain.com" or "example.com" instead, which will never resolve to anything. "your.org" gets more spam than you could possibly imagine.

whoops.

here.

grep APNIC.
Of course, that includes AU, and NZ too. The other poster's idea is better ;)

http://www.thepoles.com/? Shouldn't it have been http://www.thepoles.aq/?

I don't know ICANN policy on this, but I would hope that no country code will ever be withdrawn.

You're about 10 years late on that one. The IANA, (who has the authority for these things until ICANN takes it away) already has deleted several "obsolete" ccTLDs from its official list. Here's last year's announcement about the deletion of .zr after Zaire changed its name to "Democratic Republic of Congo".

Similarly, .cs (Czechoslovakia), .dd (East Germany), and .su (Soviet Union) were officially wiped off the face of the Earth after their associated nations were disolved, although some .su domains are reported to still resolve.

I don't know ICANN policy on this, but I would hope that no country code will ever be withdrawn.

You're about 10 years late on that one. The IANA, (who has the authority for these things until ICANN takes it away) already has deleted several "obsolete" ccTLDs from its official list. Here's last year's announcement about the deletion of .zr after Zaire changed its name to "Democratic Republic of Congo".

Similarly, .cs (Czechoslovakia), .dd (East Germany), and .su (Soviet Union) were officially wiped off the face of the Earth after their associated nations were disolved, although some .su domains are reported to still resolve.

It's not port numbers, it's protocol numbers. TCP is protocol number 6. UDP is protocol number 17. ESP is protocol number 50. AH is protocol 51. While visiting the RFCs for ESP and AH take note of the domain of the 2nd author of both.

Any HTML composer should at least verify URIs are well-formed--ECMAscript, "javascript", "jscript", and "vbscript" are all missing from the list of valid URI schemes, so there's no reason to expect them to work. Of course, anyone who enables most browsers' historically insecure scripting implementations for untrusted documents probably deserves what they get.

IANA has a complete list if you want a perusal.

When you think about it, that's really weird, since it's one of the few valid TLDs. There's .com, .net, .edu, .mil, and .org.

They also ran the IQ (Iraq) TLD as seen here. The day of the RAID, the DNS went down on the primary server. It appears to be back up now.

I'd suggest you read IANA's report which is a lot more comprehensive than the media reports.

The news article says it is a private-sector body, but it is an open body formed of stakeholders including domain registrars, users, and Internet organisations (e.g. the Internet Society and Electronic Frontiers are on the board).

I am on the board of auDA, elected as a user representative. I am not from a registrar or any commercial interest. I can say that everyone has the best interests of .au at heart and I think this is a very positive move.

auDA's plans for .au are already available on the Internet and were formed through open public processes earlier in the year. The primary result will be competition in the domain registration area. Currently the domains under .au (com.au, net.au) etc are run by parallel monopolies, but this will be opened up to a competitive environment under the plan. The competition report is here.

... if the .cx ccTLD is any indication. ICAN'T has been blocking redelegation for over a year now without stating any reason as far as I understand. The shit really hit the fan when Planet Three (who initiated the redelegation in June 2000) became insolvent. Those who were using their e-mail and web forwarding services simply disappeared from the Internet. Those who are running their own nameservers should cross their fingers and hope they don't need to change their DNS entries, because they can't. All this because ICAN'T was unable to transfer control of the TLD to nic.cx within 12 months !
You can read about it here: http://www.nic.cx/cx.home.cfm
The IANA page still lists the wrong contact information: http://www.iana.org/root-whois/cx.htm
If they are unable to keep their existing database in order, how can they possibly manage new top-level domains ?

www.nic.cx does not seem to be working.

Curious. IANA's WHOIS server index doesn't list a WHOIS server for .cx. Logically whois.nic.cx would seem appropriate, but it doesn't exist.

IANA has stated a number of times that it is not in the business of deciding what is or is not a country. Instead, they use the ISO 3166 standard to decide when they create new ccTLDs.

Reading the rules for adding a name to the ISO-3166 standard you'll see that the only way that .eu would be created as a ccTLD would be if the UN added the EU to its list of "standard country codes".

Is the UN likely to recognize the EU as a nation any time soon? No. Is there likely to be a .eu ccTLD any time soon? No.

And since ICANN falls under the UN, which was created by Treaty with the US and other nations, ICANN's wishes override the Constitution by our own Constitutional definition.

Bzzzt!

Sorry, but you are incorrect. The ICANN has nothing to do with the United Nations. From the About ICANN page:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities.

ICANN derives its authority purely from a contract with the United States government. Essentially, ICANN was created to replace IANA (John Postel r.i.p.) and ARIN.

The scary thing about ICANN is that they so quickly became beholden to Network Solutions and the other vested big-money interests, instead of paying attention to what's good for the Internet as a whole.

Recent revelations about secret deals to allow Network Solutions to hang onto the .COM databases essentially indefinitely should have woken up the US Congress to the degree to which ICANN has already been corrupted, but so far, there is no sign that anyone in Congress has noticed, nor do they appear to care.