Re: Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

[Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net>]

> On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net> wrote:
> > But to make a long story short, and my memory's perhaps a bit rusty
> > now, but my recollection is that shorter URL's looked nicer and there
> > was significant money to be had running the registry, so there was
> > some heavy lobbying against retiring .GOV in favor of .FED.US (and
> > other .US locality domains).
> [snip]
>
> The same problem exists with .EDU capriciously adopting new criteria
> that excludes any non-US-based institutions from being eligible.   I
> believe the major issue is that if a TLD is in the global namespace,
> then it should NOT be allowed to restrict registrations based on
> country;   the internet is global and  .GOV and .EDU are in Global
> Namespace.
>
> So then, why aren't  .EDU and .GOV just  allowed to continue to exist
> but a community decision made to require   whichever registry will be
> contracted to manage .GOV to accept  registrations from _all_
> government entities  regardless of nationality  ?

Because the US has historically held control over the whole process.
Regardless of what it may seem like, it's not a community process.

> In otherwords, rejection of the idea that a registry operating GTLD
> namespace can be allowed to impose overly exclusive "eligibility
> criteria"

In the specific case of ".gov", I'd say that there's some danger to
having multiple nations operating in that single 2LD space; .gov
should probably be retired and federal institutions migrated to
.fed.us.  There's also namespace available for localities.

But given the choice between rationality and insanity, usually the
process seems to prefer insanity.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
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