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Why Can't Other Countries Have .gov and .mil?
blurzero asks: "I've been wondering why the USA is the only country that can use .gov and .mil? Why can't a country have it's own .gov and .mil domain names? It seems very unfair to me. " Honestly, I think it's high time that both of these TLDs were dropped and .gov. and .mil. implemented instead. Of course, I think that the entire TLD scheme should be rethought, but that's just me.
The sad part is the longer they hold the TLDs to what they are now, the more likely it will cause problems if they want to change it later. What about 4 letter TLDs or greater. Will today's software be able to handle this or will it automatically assume 2 or 3 letters? Shouldn't each country have responsibility for its own TLDs? What would it take for another country to unilaterally implement a new TLD?
Most countries use mil and gov TLD as a SLD (second level domain(tm)). For example: brasil.gov.br (brazilian government).
I don't think it's such a bad thing, if brazil was an english speaking language and our president lived in a white palace, we could have a perfectly legal and valid: whitehouse.gov.br.
Just my $0,02...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
The same thing also applies to Educational establishments. IN the uk we have ac.uk. And no it stands for Academic, not Anonymous Coward.
.us got entries for organisation type in it? I know the 2 letter state codes are all present & accounted for (apparently, they are fairly difficult to get hold of tho'....)
.mil, .gov & .edu could be obtained internationally nowadays. Anyone know about this?
Has the tld
As internic doesn't have a monopoly on tld's anymore, and there are authorities outside the US, i'm assuming that
Not to mention the .US domain reserved for US States. Man are we greedy.
One World ... One .gov
All of this stuff is to do with history. Back in the days before the DNS became international, the US government ended up using .mil and .gov for US military and governmental institutions, in the same way as .edu is still almost entirely confined to US educational institutions. As the DNS expanded and country-level domains started being used, com., org. and net. became international in scope, but mil., gov., and edu. remained US-specific.
.com and the fundamentally erroneous "everything's in .com" attitude you find all over the net. We're also left with this bloody stupid practice of selling "popular" .com names for absurd amounts of money, which is just.. completely unnecessary and ridiculous.
.com, .net and .org are international in scope, but .gov, .mil, and .edu are US-specific domains which probably should have been assimilated under us. at some point in the past but weren't. Confusing? Right. It's all legacy stuff.
The us. domain just didn't take off, which is a shame - if it had, attitudes all over the net would have developed differently and, to my mind, the DNS wouldn't be in the toilet to the extent it is right now as a better structure would have evolved. Because of this, we're left with the flat-file mess of
Other countries generally keep their governmental institutions under their own country-level TLDs. For instance, the UK has gov.uk and mod.uk for governmental and military domains respectively. There's just no need to put them in the top-level gov. and mil. domains too. It also has the advantage that there's no central authority delegating _all_ the world's governmental and military domains.
In summary -
you know, i would feel different about allocation of .gov, .mil, and .edu if it weren't for the fact that American dollars created it all. I wonder how long it would have taken a worldwide network to get to the current size of the internet without the US military having instigated things? .com from .net and .org addresses.
The fact is, we DID create it, so deal with it.
I'd rather energy be invested in creating new TLD and/or kicking businesses back into
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Some of you who are in K12 schools may know this. .us domain as well. Here in georgia, there are any number of sites ending in k12.ga.us, and I've seen lots of other states encouraging it too. We still have school districts who insist on having a shorter .org address, but they are (thankfully) the minority.
With the wiring of schools and school districts finally happening, due to e-rate funding and paranoid school boards, there has been an explosion of k12 presence, and a good use of the
stored on computers from birth to the grave
I wouldn't have worded the prior comment as strongly, but there *is* a lot of historical precedence for the US having the unadorned TLDs. Great Britain introduced the postage stamp, so British stamps *alone* don't have to specify their country of origin. All other stamps have to provide that information. It's Boy Scouts of America, but again it's just the Boy Scouts in their first country. Ditto the American Red Cross, etc. We can argue that the North American dialing zone (USA, Canada, and some Carribean nations) don't "deserve" country code "1" just because the first practical telephone system was invented here. We can argue that American institutions don't "deserve" the unadorned TLDs just because the bulk of the work was done here. But if we're going to level the playing field, let's do it *everywhere* - don't single out the US. Some standards are arbitrary (the prime meridian has to be *somewhere*, so why not keep it in London), but don't bitch about .gov being US-centric when the Greenwich Observitory is still making noise about how it, *alone*, defined the moment that the entire world entered the year 2000, or it still makes a big deal about a brass rod marking the "prime meridian" when in fact it's moved a few hundred meters to the east (due to a slightly different model of the earth used in GPS-based coordinates. London "moved", but it minimized the shifts required worldwide.)
Has the tld .us got entries for organisation type in it? I know the 2 letter state codes are all present & accounted for (apparently, they are fairly difficult to get hold of tho'....)
.us domains are, unlike almost everything else, based on geography. They in the form of organization.city.state.us So, for example, Slashdot would be slashdot.holland.mi.us There is *no* .com.us, .org.us, or anything like that. The city and state are supposed to be based on the location of the organization (or person)'s headquarters, so you'd be stuck with things like "dupont.wilmington.de.us", even though they have facilites all over the country.
.com
The
As you can see, there are some problems with the system. Add that to the length of the names, and there's not much reason to migrate from
The big benefit, though, is that they are free. Despite this, they still aren't used much, which I think says a lot about the whole system.
For more info, check out http://www.nic.us/.
I expect that phone numbers will have gone the way of the dinosaurs within 3-5 years. When you think about it, they're rather kludgy anyway, being a compromise between machines and humans which are ideal for neither. Switching equipment has to figure out which phones they go to anyway, but since humans aren't very good at remembering that many numbers, separating them into groups of 3 or 4 digits is supposed to be more mnemonic, but isn't completely satisfactory in that regard. There are just way too many phones, so the number of digits just get longer and longer every few years. (Was that phone number on the commercial I saw yesterday 1-800, 1-888, 1-877?)
In the future, dialing will be all keyword based, and everyone will have forgotten what phone numbers are. Just say "Coca-Cola" into the phone and you'll be connected right to Coca-Cola's CEO. (Or more likely, you'll be given a list of choices -- your local Coca-Cola distributor, a Coca-Cola bottler in your state, a nearby convenience store that sells Coca-Cola, an antique shop that has a case of super bowl commemorative Coca-Cola with Mean Joe Green's picture on the bottles, another nearby convenience store that competes with the first one, an order-line for Coca-Cola memorabilia, nutritional information for Coca-Cola, a list of human rights groups protesting Coca-Cola's involvement with oppressive governments in the third world, the vault where the secret recipe for Coca-Cola is kept, a fax-back copy of a bogus study implicating the nutri-sweet in Diet Coke with Gulf War Syndrome, Coca-Cola's consumer information line, ...) Say "Official Coca-Cola line" and you'll be taken directly there.
Your smart phone will figure it all out for you. You'll be connected directly to a recording describing an endless list of menu items to choose from. Because we all know that choosing from a preselected list is always much more accurate than having to be specific about what you want ahead of time.
Anyway, my point is that we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about things like who has what address. We'll be satisfied with the selections presented before us because the big moneyed corporations who bought up all the keywords will always know what we are looking for and what we should be getting.
The answer isn't nearly as ominous or arrogant.
The original designers of the net and DNS weren't designing for the world. They were building a network between U.S. educational institutions and the U.S. military network. Since a lot of research for the U.S. military was done by research universities in the U.S., they chose names for the top level domains to simply represent what they were working with. For a good quick history on the net, check _The Cuckoo's Egg_ by Clifford Stoll. It doesn't explicitly deal with the top-level domain structure, but it does show that the original design of the net was not intended to be an international communications net.
It wasn't arrogance or U.S.-centricism. They just didn't think it would end up being a world wide phenomonon. Considering that the original design was more than twenty years ago, I think they can be excused for not seeing the information revolution.
Want sites related to keywords? Fine, that's what search engines are for. (And if that's too difficult, hey, there's alway AOL. (snicker))
Want to contact a specific machine or service? You need an address. How does e-mail, or ftp, work with your keyword scheme? Does "mail someguy@Coca-cola" give me the Coca-cola corporation, the memorabilla site, or what?
I would suggest that few people use them now. Naive users go to their ISP's configured portal and search for some keyword - often using a hostname as a search term, rather that using an "open location" menu option, because URLs and hostnames are a mystery to them. Slightly more knowledgeable users might type in www.megacorp.com in an "open location" box to get to the MegaCorp website, but a long URL - http://www.megacorp.com/some/document.html - leaves them lost.That's fine for the Great Unwashed - their search for "infamous.net" will certainly turn up my website - but when I want to telnet somewhere, I need a hostname (or IP address, of course), not a keyword.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Well, I hate to get into a "how long have you been on" argument, but since you brought it up, I've been online since 1989, thank you very much. I use elm to read my email.
Want to contact a specific machine or service? You need an address.
I'm not saying they won't exist. I'm saying they'll be invisible to the user, and only of concern to the computer.
They already are on much of the web. How many addresses are embedded in mailto links without displaying the address on screen? Why wouldn't that work in other applications?
When you go to decode an email which someone has encoded using your PGP public key, do you need to be able to see your private key? Why? Do you type it in by hand every time you use it? Do you even care what it is, as long is it exists and it works and it's secure?
Why, then, do you need to know someone's email address? Wouldn't you rather just type "Sodium Attack" than having to look up the email address? If you know more than one Sodium Attack, then your computer can present you with a list of choices, or otherwise offer you a way of distinguishing one from another.
And if you're trying to contact someone at Coca-Cola, under the current system you still need to go and find the correct address. What's the difference whether you're able to see the address itself, or you find a link allowing you to email Coca-Cola, with the actual address hidden from view?
when I want to telnet somewhere, I need a hostname (or IP address, of course), not a keyword
Your software needs the hostname or IP address. You do not.
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Has the tld .us got entries for organisation type in it? I know the 2 letter state codes are all present & accounted for (apparently, they are fairly difficult to get hold of tho')
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've seen .us domains (e.g. FWCS) without a city. Couldn't .co.us (State of Colorado) sell its namespace like Christmas Island (of Goatse.cx fame) did?
Will I retire or break 10K?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Yes, but how many times has somthing seemed to work only to flop when implemented across the board.