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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.
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 -
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.)
The exception to this is .nsn.us.
That is grouped by tribe, such as:
.cheyenne.nsn.us
.sioux.nsn.us
.chickasaw.nsn.us
regardless of what state surrounds them.
nsn stands for "Native Sovereign Nation". I suppose that those tribes that aren't sovereign by treaty shouldn't qualify; dunno if any have a domain.
Of course, just because they HAVE the domain, doesn't mean anything resolves there. Most email addresses of the Chickasaw tribe, for instance, are @chickasaw.com, which is an ISP previously owned by the tribe.
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