[ih] .UK vs .GB

[Eric Gade]

Sorry one more message about this, as I've dug up an old copy of my
dissertation (which in part addresses this issue). In 1984 when the DNS RFC
was being drafted (I was mistaken it was the summer of 1984 not 1985), the
proposal to use the ISO-3166 list for ccTLDs came pretty late in the game.
There are limited records of discussions about this outside of draft RFCs
kept by Feinler and emails that appear on the Namedroppers list.

As I said previously, they were already using .UK as their top-level in the
NRS hierarchy in the UK. The document record shows that even as the DNS
went into use, there was a lot of pressure for the Joint Network Team to
revise how they structured their names, not just because of the UK/GB
issue, but also because of the reversal of the names (hence the 1990 fiasco
of adding Czech). The JNT had very clear reasons for not making the
changes: they did not think the DNS would be the world standard, and had
invested both time and money in making ISO standards a reality. They did
not want to spend the money or time on making such changes to the NRS just
for DNS purposes, when they believed a new international standard was
inevitable and would require yet more changes. The X.400/X.500 systems were
simply going to replace everything anyway, so the wisdom went.

On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 10:24 PM, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com> wrote:

> The NIC collection at CHM has info about this. The draft RFCs where Postel
> first proposed TLDs (between Jan and May 85 I believe) all proposed UK as
> examples. Discussion on the "Namedroppers" list at the time made it pretty
> clear why: the UCL nodes used the NRS (Name Recocognition Scheme) and
> already had UK at the top level (though reversed)
>
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 22:12 Patrik Fältström <paf at frobbit.se> wrote:
>
>> On 13 Apr 2018, at 15:12, John Levine wrote:
>>
>> > In another list someone was wondering why British domain names are
>> mostly in .UK even though the ISO 3166 code has always been .GB.
>> >
>> > I know this came up before but can't find the discussion.  Pointers or
>> rehash welcome.  The first mention I can find of .UK is in an example in
>> RFC 821 in 1982, the first statement that ccTLDS would be ISO 3166 codes
>> was in 1984.
>>
>> The only explanation I got orally was that "GB stands for Great Britain,
>> while UK stands for United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Northern
>> Ireland".
>>
>> That was enough for me. Don't even remember who explained it, but it was
>> around the famous entry of .CS into the root zone that created the
>> "interesting" situation with CS.BERKELEY.EDU (and others) and massive
>> weird extra hacking in sendmail.cf due to the Janet "reverse" order of
>> labels in a domain name.
>>
>> But, I might also have constructed this story in my head... :-)
>>
>>    paf
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>>
>


-- 
Eric
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