On Sun, 21 Sep 1997 bmanning at ISI.EDU wrote:
I am not saying that the com/net/org problem can now be solved easily. What I am saying is that the original design had a serious flaw, in that no one thought through the long-term implications of creating global TLDs. I am not castigating the designers either. But I would ***************************************** suggest that if the DNS had been designed in a smaller country, more thought would have been given to the fact that there are other countries out there. ... Perhaps I am getting out of depth here, but I think that I take exception to one of your premises. As has been explained to me, the original design was to name things based on the funding organization. This proved unwieldy and was replaced by naming by broad classification e.g. com, edu, gov and the like. This worked well for a number of years, with the then European Internet community actively participating. The reason that the ISO3166 codes were used was that there were some governments that insisted that they be given equal status in the DNS heirarchy.
This does not disagree with my premise, which is essentially that no one thought much about the implications of what they were doing.
In some sense, it turned out to be almost an "Internet community or Government" style debate on where you registered. I perceive the existing ISO3166 style delegation points almost like the original "named by funding agent" model.There are just too many presumptions about policy (or lack thereof) based on the DNS lable you happen to be carrying about.
So, if you were given a clean slate, how would you design the DNS namespace?
I am just now fully committed to writing a proposal which touches on one small?part of that question and must be delivered tomorrow. So I would prefer to come back to the question later this week, time permitting, or this next weekend. You know, weekends are times when there are no meetings so we can can some work done ;-) -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015 -------- Logged at Sun Sep 21 18:58:30 MET DST 1997 ---------