[ih] Dot Com etc

[Dave CROCKER]

On 1/20/2010 2:42 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> 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.


On the other hand, .org was meant to refer to non-commercial organizations and 
.com was meant to refer to commercial ones.

Yes, commercial organizations on the net were initially limited to those doing 
government work, but there were plenty of for-profit companies on the net, from 
its start.  Such as, oh, for example, BBN.

And their use of the net expanded to include traffic that wasn't strictly 
related to their government contracts.  Although this is what the AUP was 
intended to proscribe, it's effectiveness was limited.

While I was at Digital Equipment Corp, in the late 80's, when the Acceptable Use 
Policy was still in effect, we had to resolve an apparent policy problem with 
doing DEC traffic over the Internet.  The corporate lawyer initially looked at 
the AUP and said that it meant we couldn't do anything other than traffic 
related to government contracts.  (The concern, at that point, was using the net 
for doing product support.)

We countered by noting that other commercial groups were using the net for 
commercial purposes and we needed him to give us a work-around.  I don't 
remember the details of what followed, but he did adapt his assessment...

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net