[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Eric Gade]

>
> 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.


No one from this list nor anyone else I tried to contact could give me a
definitive answer on when this decision was made. I had to try and figure it
out myself. It appears that something changed between May and July of 1984.
In July, a draft RFC was posted that included the ISO-3166 list for the
first time. Four months beforehand, Postel first announced to Namedroppers
that he felt there should be countries represented somewhere in the
hierarchy. This came after a fairly significant amount of lobbying by all
kinds of people, but many of them had OSI sympathies.

Of course the idea of organizing by countries predates OSI. The idea of
organizing DNS by countries, however, doesn't. This wasn't a common-sense
solution either. The biggest concern in the first few years was to find a
way to quell the voices calling for naming structures that reflected network
topology, and many believed that organizational (as opposed to geographic)
would solve the immediate concerns, given the landscape of the connected
nets (think AT&T, Xerox, etc).

I am not retroactively trying to politicize these issues, because in the
documents people at the time explicitly describe these problems as
political. Again, I'm going on what I've found, which may be an incomplete
picture. But take the counterfactual: without the prominence of OSI issues
in the general discourse, which itself brought at least some of the
attention of Arpanauts to international geopolitics, would there have been
the ccTLDs in the system? I would say no. You can argue that UK is an
exception because of the UCL link and I would of course concede the point.
But I don't think it's fair to argue that suddenly including UK opens up the
entire ISO list, especially since they don't even follow the standard.

--
Eric
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