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<div>The thing is I don't know what you think the "OSI issues"
were?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I would have to look, but I don't think in 1984 that the X.500
work had started and if it had it would have been very early. They
would have been coming up with a directory protocol and trying to
throw everything in that someone might use for a naming tree.
There was certainly no consideration of what sorts of naming trees
would actually be created, or for that matter who was going to create
them. It certainly would not have been "OSI."</div>
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<div>Lots of people had ideas but there was no OSI position on it.
That I can guarantee. The date on X.500 is 1990. Generally
took 4-5 years to do this and the X.500 stuff was highly controversial
within OSI.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The naming and addressing addendum to 7498 didn't complete until
88. It was just getting started in 84. X.500 didn't even
start until Part 3 was well along, because I sent one of those guys to
shepherd X.500.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Again, what you are labeling OSI issues really seems to be after
the fact. You appear to have fallen prey to the "effect of
TS Eliot on Shakespeare" phenomena (with apologies to David
Lodge).</div>
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<div><br></div>
<div>At 22:53 +0000 2011/02/17, Eric Gade wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<blockquote>The original plan, as I recall, was to simply have gTLDs.
But somewhere<br>
before the final TLD meeting at SRI in January 1986, there was a
decision to<br>
allow the UK to have a TLD. Most likely this reflected a request
from<br>
Peter Kirstein.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>No one from this list nor anyone else I
tried to contact could give me a definitive answer on when this
decision was made. I had to try and figure it out myself. It appears
that something changed between May and July of 1984. In July, a draft
RFC was posted that included the ISO-3166 list for the first time.
Four months beforehand, Postel first announced to Namedroppers that he
felt there should be countries represented somewhere in the hierarchy.
This came after a fairly significant amount of lobbying by all kinds
of people, but many of them had OSI sympathies.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Of course the idea of organizing by
countries predates OSI. The idea of organizing DNS by countries,
however, doesn't. This wasn't a common-sense solution either. The
biggest concern in the first few years was to find a way to quell the
voices calling for naming structures that reflected network topology,
and many believed that organizational (as opposed to geographic) would
solve the immediate concerns, given the landscape of the connected
nets (think AT&T, Xerox, etc).</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I am not retroactively trying to
politicize these issues, because in the documents people at the time
explicitly describe these problems as political. Again, I'm going on
what I've found, which may be an incomplete picture. But take
the counterfactual: without the prominence of OSI issues in the
general discourse, which itself brought at least some of the attention
of Arpanauts to international geopolitics, would there have been the
ccTLDs in the system? I would say no. You can argue that UK is an
exception because of the UCL link and I would of course concede the
point. But I don't think it's fair to argue that suddenly including UK
opens up the entire ISO list, especially since they don't even follow
the standard.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>--</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Eric</blockquote>
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