[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

The thing is I don't know what you think the "OSI issues" were?

I would have to look, but I don't think in 1984 that the X.500 work 
had started and if it had it would have been very early. They would 
have been coming up with a directory protocol and trying to throw 
everything in that someone might use for a naming tree.  There was 
certainly no consideration of what sorts of naming trees would 
actually be created, or for that matter who was going to create them. 
It certainly would not have been "OSI."

Lots of people had ideas but there was no OSI position on it.  That I 
can guarantee.  The date on X.500 is 1990.  Generally took 4-5 years 
to do this and the X.500 stuff was highly controversial within OSI.

The naming and addressing addendum to 7498 didn't complete until 88. 
It was just getting started in 84.  X.500 didn't even start until 
Part 3 was well along, because I sent one of those guys to shepherd 
X.500.

Again, what you are labeling OSI issues really seems to be after the 
fact.  You appear to have fallen prey to the "effect of TS Eliot on 
Shakespeare" phenomena (with apologies to David Lodge).


At 22:53 +0000 2011/02/17, Eric Gade wrote:
>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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