[ih] Impact of history on today's technology [was: why did CC happen at all?]

[Craig Partridge]

> This might better apply to the technical implementation, I suppose. For
> example, there was a lot of collaboration on drafting the technical
> specification for DNS that became Paul Mockapetris' RFCs. The way the
> servers work, the data structures, and the different records fall in this
> category. Maybe we're talking past each other here, but that's not the part
> I'm referring to.
> 
> I would call the intellectual climate of ARPA-Internet and OSI a political
> one. By that I mean politics internal to the community.
> 
> In the archives I found meeting notes etc which indicate quite explicitly
> that countries should be TLDs because the system being developed by IFIP
> (which was doing pre-standards work for naming/addressing for OSI) would
> have countries at the top. In fact, there was a lot of clamor for countries
> at the top from people who were either affiliated with other OSI work or
> working on IFIP itself. I found only a couple of cases where people argued
> for a geographical structure on its own merits.
> 
> There was an assumption by many non-Americans, and some Americans too, that
> OSI would subsume whatever standards ARPA developed. This assumption is to
> my mind a reflection of the internal politics I'm talking about, and it
> influenced how people argued for a certain naming structure. So while it's
> absolutely true that no one was looking at the relevant OSI parts
> (x.400/x.500) and thinking of making domains, it is true that the existence
> of these looming, assumed (by some) standards had a big influence on
> domains.

This account matches my recollections and what I found when writing up
the email history.  There was at least an official stance that OSI was
the future.  It also highlights why Jon Postel set up .us the
way he did (to spike easy OSI transition).

I am not sure I would term this aspect namespace creation "technical".
We were not solving technical problems when we populated the namespace --
indeed, that's part of what made that process more painful.

(Side note: the one counter argument I can think to use to say namespace
creation was technical is that the decision to support country codes meant
we had to have a namespace with greater than two labels.  In the earliest
DNS thinking, there was a notion that we'd have two level names such
as VENERA.ISI -- I believe it was clear pretty fast that two levels
was probably too limiting -- but once you add ccTLDs, you clearly need
at least three levels and there's an rule of thumb that one
counts 1, 2, many...).

Craig