- To all you gentlemen who have contributed to the discussion so far - As ESA-internal coordinator of domains and naming structure, I am obviously not too pleased to see another organisation use the same acronym, but I don't believe that this necessarily causes major problems. This is because of the following. In addition to adopting the registration policy recommended to us by RIPE, namely to register in each country esa.<TLD>, we have established a further convention. Underneath the esa.<TLD>, the name of the ESA establishment is added as a further subdomain in all cases, e.g. estec.esa.nl esoc.esa.de esrin.esa.it, etc. This implies that chances of a clash in domain names are *very* small. Furthermore, ESA has currently no establishments in CH and therefore no intention to register esa.ch. For the hypothetical case where this would happen, the question remains for me if and how the responsibility for a 2nd-level subdomain can be shared and coordinated between two organisations? Btw, I also know about another potential conflict coming up - I've heard of plans within Germany to align 2nd-level domain names with the regional abbreviations known to all from German car plates - e.g. K for Cologne, DA for Darmstadt, etc. Assuming that we as international organisation could stay out of this scheme and retain esa.de, this would cause a clash with the region of Eisenach (also ESA), and the same considerations as above would apply. Comments/Suggestions welcome! Regards, Walter ------------------------------------------------------------------ European Space Agency/Operations Centre Tel: +49-6151-90-2213 Robert Bosch Strasse 5 Fax: +49-6151-90-4213 D-64293 Darmstadt, Germany email: wdillen@esoc.bitnet