[ih] Dot Com etc

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Bob!

I also have the feeling that Jon put the list together, since as I
recall he was the only one of us organized enough to deal with such
things...

As to *why* that initial list was chosen, my recollection is that it
simply reflected the demographics of the emerging "Internet community"
at the time.  There were lots of governmental entities and lots of
schools.  The "rest of world" were commercial, or companies.  

Plus it was likely that someone from each TLD subgroup would step up and
volunteer to be the coordinator/arbitrator of name etiquette within that
subgroup.  You couldn't have a TLD unless there was someone willing to
manage it.   

The nascent Internet was very US-centric, again reflecting the
demographics.  Gov meant US government.  Com was US companies, weighted
toward government contractors such as BBN or Linkabit - I can't recall
any non-US companies being involved until later in the game.   

I think .com originally was derived from "company" rather than
"commercial".  The .com's weren't thought of as "businesses" in the
sense of places that consumers go to buy things.  They were companies
doing government contract work.  The Internet was not chartered to
interconnect businesses - it was a military command-and-control
prototype network, being built by educational, governmental, and
contractors.  If anybody had suggested that businesses were to be
included, it would have raised flotillas of red flags in the
administrative ranks of government and PTTs.  Hence .com -- not .biz.

I don't recall anybody ever thinking we were creating an organizational
structure to encompass hundreds of millions of entities covering the
entire planet in support of all human activities.  And it certainly
wasn't supposed to last for 30+ years, even as an experiment.  It just
happened to turn out that way.

IIRC, there weren't any major debates or counterproposals or such about
TLDs.  The TLD list just wasn't that big a deal (at the time).  The
Internet was an *experiment* which, like all experiments, was supposed
to end.  CCITT, ISO, and such organizations were inventing the official
technologies for the future of data communications.  We know now how
that turned out   Whatever TLD list and such was used in the Internet
wasn't supposed to last long.  So a specific logistical decision like
the TLD list wasn't all that important - at the time.

I agree that whatever discussion happened was almost certainly carried
out mostly on the email lists which served as the primary way for
everybody to interact between quarterly meetings, and then Jon and crew
most likely put the initial list together, and there wasn't any real
opposition so it became real.  

It's very difficult to identify who "invented" anything in those days.
There was lots of discussions, ideas, and strawmen passed around in
emails and then eventually somebody wrote the document or wrote the code
to capture the "rough consensus" of the discussion.

/Jack


On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 13:18 -0800, Bob Braden wrote:
> 
> internet-history-request at postel.org wrote:
> 
> > 
> >> Does anyone know why .com; .edu and .gov were chosen? I know it seems
> >> simple, but why .com instead of something like .biz?
> > 
> 
> I recall seeing those TLD names on Jon's white board at the time. I feel 
> quite certain that they came out of Jon's head, but were ratified by 
> discussions with Paul.
> 
> Bob Braden
> 
> 
>