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

[Craig Partridge]

> On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 08:23:57AM -0400, Craig Partridge wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > (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...).
> 
> Can you please expand on this? Are you referring to system name
> labels or including usernames as well? How is a ccTLD different from
> a non-ccTLD in this respect? If I might be user at example.com, I could
> presumably be user at example.cctld if the ccTLD allows registration
> in the second level, rather than creating additional structure. Some
> ccTLDs did create extra structure, such as uk, jp, and nz. Others,
> like cn, de, nl allowed registration at the second level.

Sure.  I'm not talking about usernames but simply domain names.

At the time, we generally had to name each host (MX records came to the
party late).  So, if you were an organization, you needed to have your
organization name and a host name -- such as VENERA.ISI.  But if
we had ccTLDs, folks in the ccTLD needed at least three levels -- so
VENERA.ISI.US.  And once you did that, it was clear that four levels
probably needed to be supported (esp. since the UK was clear from
early on that it would divide up .UK into CO.UK and AC.UK, which meant that
CSL.CAM.AC.UK was clearly desirable).  And at that point, you might
as well have no (few) limits.

Thanks!

Craig