Should Two Letter TLDs Be Immune ?
John Charles Broomfield jbroom at manta.outremer.com
Mon Apr 27 22:57:46 CEST 1998
Hi Jim, > People seem to have no problem allowing the 2 letter TLDs > to be grandfathered to have immunity from the Green Paper > and the U.S. Government. The assumption appears to be > that the 2 letter TLDs have been delegated to individuals, > companies and in some cases governments with care. This > is not necessarily the case. Resume of rest of message just to save space (If I've got it wrong, just say so): National TLDs should be regulated in the same way as gTLDs because not all of them are functioning correctly. I disagree VERY strongly. I think there are few areas where one can say there is high consensus (not just general or rough) in the DNS area, but one of these rare areas is that most people agree that 2 letter (or national) TLDs are a local matter, where local means the area described by the 2 letters in ISO-3166. The unwritten (is it not yet official?) addendum to RFC-1591 gives ultimate authority in 2 letter TLDs to the government of that area. This in fact means that the local government is sovereign for how any given 2 letter TLD is run. Oh, so you don't like how .cn is run? Do you think China would accept someone from outside telling them what to do with it? Maybe you dislike Tonga running ".to" as a "how-to" TLD? Trying to interfere with how separate 2 letter TLDs are run is like trying to impose how each country should run it's census or it's telephone system. However, drawing up a set of specifications which are DESIRABLE and RECOMENDABLE is probably a very good idea, and would go a long way in solving the problems you pointed out. I feel however that enforcement and/or regulation should be left out of it. Yours, John Broomfield. GP & MQ NIC -------- Logged at Mon Apr 27 23:07:02 MET DST 1998 ---------
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