On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 02:37:47PM -0500, Andy Gardner wrote:
but one other ccTLD has done it in recent times - I can;'t recall which one but Steven Heath knows.
.ca opened up their SLD a while back, but I don't think they threw away the existing infrastructure.
Right, it's still there. CA used a province/city hierarchy according to how widely the registering entity was incorporated: federally- incorporated entities got myname.ca, entities only incorporated in Ontario (say) got myname.on.ca, and entities with no incorporation living in (say) St Thomas, Ontario got myname.st-thomas.on.ca. Any single entity was only allowed one name. Registrations were free. There was a cabal^Wcommittee on which representatives from various big ISPs sat and interpreted the elaborate rules for each and every registration application. I don't know the details, but I am guessing this did not scale. Who knows, politics may have been involved. Maybe a buffoon or three. Now CIRA runs the registry. Registrations are not free any more, and various restrictions have been removed. It's now possible for anybody to register names at federal, provincial and municipal level without corresponding restrictions on scope or incorporation. Some restrictions remain, like residency/citizenship. This effectively removes the requirement for the provincial/municipal hierarchy, without disbanding it. I have yet to meet an internet user who has been confused by this; however, the fact that there have always been organisation-looking names hung directly under CA probably helped. For the record, I am all in favour of maori.nz, and I am also in favour of bank.nz. I'm also in favour of $foo.nz, where $foo is any label permitted by RFC1035, for which there is not currently a delegation under NZ, and I am most definitely in favour of $foo.nz being delegated several thousand times per month without a single meeting being held, public or otherwise. Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog