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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 05/09/2014 16:31, Eric Gade wrote:
...
> I believe it's in one of those papers that Postel says, "Naming is a
> uniquely political act."

Which reminds me that at some very early stage, we at CERN were somewhat
concerned not to locate CERN in any one country in cyberspace, so we
asked Jon to let us have "cern" as a TLD ("int" did not exist then).
He kindly explained why that wasn't going to happen, and in the end
we registered cern.ch since CERN's legal "seat" is in Switzerland.
But I also insisted that we registered cern.fr, because we didn't
want to encourage the idea that the Swiss Telecom monopoly applied to us,
and the computer centre including the mail servers was on French soil
anyway.

Definitely a political act at that time (~1986).

We never used cern.fr and it seems to be cybersquatted these days.

   Brian