[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Klensin]

Since I was more than a little involved in some of this (I vague
remember Jon's telling me about conversations with Ken, but there were
other conversations going on too), let me add a little calibration...

On 2/17/11, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com> 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.

"request from Peter Kirstein" is certainly what I was told... or
possibly something stronger than a request.  My recollection, again
from what he told me a while later, is that Jon started worrying about
names of countries, authorities for what was a country, and
appropriate abbreviated names almost as soon as the idea of country
TLDs came up.   I don't remember how Jon found the ISO 3166 list or
who pointed him to it although I probably did know at one time.   In
any event, it met the criteria he was looking for --an authoritative
list, with someone else as the authority (so that IANA didn't need to
decide), of both countries and territories and codes that could be
used for them.    At the time, ISO 3166 contained a provision strongly
encouraging (nearly mandating) that anyone who wanted to use the code
system contact the secretariat for the Registration Authority (I'm
pretty sure it was still a Registration Authority at the time) at DIN
and discuss the intended use.   As I recall, Jon wrote them a letter
describing the possible DNS application and got back a response that
amounted to "don't do that, use OSI identifiers".   Then there was a
bit of a negotiation, probably in 85 but possibly earlier (I could
reconstruct the dates, but it would take a lot of work), that I got
involved in partially because I was back and forth to Berlin at the
time, after which we agreed that we were going to use the 3166 list
and they agreed that they couldn't prevent us from doing so.

Parts of those discussions strongly influenced RFC 1571 in spite of
the fact that Jon didn't get around to initiating writing it until
many years later.

>...

> 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.

I know of the UK request.  I know that there were some very clear "if
the UK gets one, we may want one too" indications.  And, as Craig
points out, once email routing to all sorts of other networks because
part of the story, country domains, even for countries with no actual
TCP/IP Internet connectivity, became obvious because many of the
connections used dialup phone lines (which were, of course, very much
country (and national PTT)-based.   I don't know about the "fairly
significant lobbying" effort.   As far as the "OSI sympathies" are
concerned, lots of people and governments say OSI as inevitable and
others learned to speak OSI language because the terminology was handy
and better-defined, even when it didn't map very well onto the
Internet (as Mike Padlipsky and others pointed out quite forcefully).
Whether either the sense of inevitability or the use of the vocabulary
constituted "OSI sympathies" is probably in the mind of the beholder.

> 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).

But, if one believes in a distributed administrative hierarchy,
organizing by countries -- especially for countries with their own
network plans and plans to connect them to the Internet but not
necessarily to be running TCP/IP and the associated applications
suites-- actually is a common-sense solution.

> 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.

Well, actually they did, if one counts the time-honored practice of
anticipating a standard a bit and then getting it wrong.  I haven't
gone back and sorted out the chronology, but 3166 itself wasn't very
old when the DNS started using it.    And, apparently (according to
what I was told in the mid-80s and again in the late 90s -- the latter
by someone who had been the BSI representative to ISO TC 46 and the
3166 Maintenance Agency at the time) the 3166 code was originally "UK"
but either BSI or Her Majesty's Government changed their minds just
before the standard was adopted.  There was also a story for a while
that UK was used for the DNS in order to avoid confusion with
inevitable OSI naming, but I don't know whether that was accurate or
apocryphal.   In any event, what including UK opened up was not "the
entire ISO list" but the quest for a list of entities and codes that
would prevent Jon/IANA from  getting embroiled in debates about who
was eligible for a TLD and what the TLD name should be.  The use of
the 3166 list ("entire" or otherwise) was the result of that search.

      john