[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Eric Gade]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Craig Partridge <craig at aland.bbn.com>wrote:

> Then in January 1986, when the central question of finalizing DNS TLDs
> was decided, it was explicitly decided to structure .US to make it
> completely useless for X.500 migration.


This is really fascinating stuff.
There is little documentation on Postel's perspective on such matters, aside
from anecdotes and what's in public, because his archives at USC are
off-limits (though they have been sorted) until an 'appropriate' amount of
time has passed.

Still I managed to find interesting things in the NIC collection.  One is a
paper that Postel co-authored with Mockapetris for a conference and
presented in April 1985. Using IFIP and DNS propositions as examples, they
go on to list the differences between "Tree Systems" and "Attribute
Systems." Here is the section that interests me the most:

>  *One solution would be to layer an attribute system on top of a
> self-sufficient tree system...*
>
> I assumed that this was -- at the very least -- a concession made to the
OSI community, or that it was a way to somehow justify (though how necessary
would justification be?) the DNS being developed.

I think there may be a case for saying that the inclusion of ccTLDs in
the first place was inspired -- at least in part -- by OSI advocates
precisely because that's the type of organization they wanted at the top.
The fact that the codes were pulled from an ISO list might not be mere
coincidence either, though I'm going out on a limb with that.

In terms of actual organizations and authorities, that's an interesting case
too. A lot of the correspondence seems to indicate not only that the NIC
didn't want the job of TLD registration and administration, but that there
were expectations that international organizations would take these over,
and suggestions included such orgs as ANSI (side note: when ANSI started
registering OSI names in 1988 or 89, it was charging a whopping $1k per
name. NIC was still doing this for free I think, but meeting notes show that
early projections of pricing were around $70).

--
Eric
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