[ih] Funny how things work out

[Brian E Carpenter]

Oddly enough, I only noticed today that .cern has been a TLD since 2014. I'm amazed they bothered.

The reason CERN was originally .cern.ch is that in about 1987, when we were a central point in European academia, in particular operating an important mail interchange gateway, someone in my team wrote to IANA asking for the TLD ".cern".** Jon replied very nicely explaining why this was a silly idea. I don't have those emails, regrettably, but I believe that he suggested .cern.int, although .int was still a bit of a political football then. We opted for .cern.ch and I believe we also got .cern.fr, which we never used, although our computer centre was on the French side of the border. So, some 25 years later one of my successors at CERN decided that Jon was wrong, and ICANN agreed.

I just looked at the current state of the TLD registry. It's (IMNSHO) horrible. Counting up, there are the following numbers of TLDs of various types:
Generic 1247, Sponsored 14, Country Code 316, Infrastructure 1.

Back in early 1998, the IAB wrote to Ira Magaziner in response to the Green Paper that led to ICANN. Among other things, we said "On the other hand, a very large increase in the total number of gTLDs (say to thousands) would lead us into technically unknown territory." Are we there yet?

** One variant of my address at that time was BRIAN%priam.cern at ean-relay.ac.uk, so you can see that we'd preempted the domain already :-).

Regards
   Brian Carpenter