[ih] Naming and addressing

[Dave Crocker]

On 3/31/2010 8:16 AM, Elizabeth Feinler wrote:
>> Also a quick question folks have been asking me -- when did we have country
>> code TLDs and when did we decide to use the ISO list?   I think we had ccTLDs
>> by late 1985 as .UK was active and Jon P. had assigned .US to himself (at
>> least, that's what I remember).  But I think choosing a list of ccTLDs blessed
>> by ISO was done a bit later.  Yes?
>
> I will punt this one to Paul M. or Joyce Reynolds.  ISO decreed that international standards had jurisdiction down to the country-level TLD, and from there the naming scheme was up to the country itself.  It was at that time that Jon applied for the .us domain, as I remember it.  This was a parallel effort with us at the time, and I do not recall the exact time frame.


I don't recall discussing this with Jon or other DNS folk directly, but the 
story I heard was:

Jon watched the political challenges in 'country' naming and decided to invoke a 
model that already had some popularity in Arpanet/Internet design:  specify a 
framework, and defer the fine-grained details to a group that focusses on them.

In this case, that mean specifying use of the ISO table and thereby deferring 
definition of the table's contents to ISO.

(Other examples of this model include MIME, with Content-type, and email 
addresses do this, by deferring the details of mailboxes to the 
host/organization that owns them.  For email addresses, this is in contrast with 
the way X.400 specified addresses.  So the model of framework-and-defer really 
is noteworthy.)

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net