[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

Yea, I told him the same thing.  Only forgot to do a reply all.

I don't think there was much interaction between those two groups at all.

The idea of organizing by country pre-dates OSI by decades.  ;-)


At 15:37 -0500 2011/02/17, Craig Partridge wrote:
>  > 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.
>
>Actually I think you're out on the limb...
>
>The original plan, as I recall, was to simply have gTLDs.  But somewhere
>before the final TLD meeting at SRI in January 1986, there was a decision to
>allow the UK to have a TLD.  Most likely this reflected a request from
>Peter Kirstein.
>
>At the January 1986 meeting, I think (and I'll note, it was not the
>central topic of the meeting and I am relying on memory, so this recollection
>could be faulty), we agreed to let people decide whether to register
>in their country or in a gTLD.  I do remember an impassioned, by Postel
>standards, statement from Jon about why would a university register under
>its country when its most important attribute was that it was an educational
>institution.
>
>I also remember that either at the meeting or soon after, there was
>a brief discussion of how to vet applications for ccTLDs -- Jon did not
>want to be in the business of deciding who was a country and who was not.
>I believe Jon was aware at that time of the two Germanys problem (which
>was not, as you might imagine, between East and West Germany, but rather
>an internal fight in West Germany between the PTT and a university 
>[Karlsruhe?]
>about who controlled the major Internet link into Germany and had pulled
>CSNET into a diplomatic mess [US State Dept, Germany embassy, etc all leaning
>on CSNET which correctly sussed that the PTT was incompetent and was loath
>to abandon the competent university which was providing free Internet email
>to any academic in Germany who requested it]).
>
>So Jon discovered that ISO produced a list of country abbreviations that
>was blessed by the UN or some such as reflecting the international concensus
>of who was and was not a country and said "I'll use this list".  This proved
>wise (e.g. the Macedonia tiff a few years later in which Jon could simply
>say "I'm making no diplomatic decisions, I'm simply following the
>internationally approved list").
>
>Thanks!
>
>Craig
>
>PS: Side note -- while there was considerable debate on namedroppers, my
>sense is that most of the key naming decisions where made by Ken Harrenstein
>and Jon and they coordinated with each other.  Ken did most of the analysis
>and arguing of points and Jon periodically would announce a decision.