On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Craig Whitmore wrote:

Give New Zealand back "archie.nz" pleaseeeee..

Actually actually, why can't why have a simple .nz domain, comme les Suedois et al, who have .se minus all the silly cruft in front? Oh, and how was it that 'co.nz' was deemed appropriate for commercial entities? I was under the distinct impression that a bad sense of Internet humour didn't exist in New Zealand until I moved here. -- Juha Saarinen - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

At 7:13 AM +1200 27/8/02, DPF wrote:

...

Oh, and how was it that 'co.nz' was deemed appropriate for commercial entities? I was under the distinct impression that a bad sense of Internet humour didn't exist in New Zealand until I moved here.

These decisions predate InternetNZ and I presume were made by John Houlker after consultation with others in the early or mid 90s. The decisions, as I understand it, was to mainly follow the .uk structure except we chose govt.nz instead of gov.nz.

Consensus of the implementors at the time, of whom John was but one of several, and it was 88-89, not early-mid 90s. (I appear to have been visible @vuwcomp.nz in 88 and @rata.vuw.ac.nz by 89). Some design goals (in hindsight, possibly misguided): 1. Delegated authority. I.e., choose a few 2LDs and the owners of those got to do the work of administering them. Any rules they chose to impose were their decision, subject to the rfc constraints and some guidelines. The DNS was designed to be a delegated hierarchy. 2. This was still the time of uucp names, and even with an organisation the top level domains might not be appended. Thus, we might write jeffries.law rather than jeffries.law.vuw or jeffries.law.vuw.ac.nz. For this reason, the use of TLDs as 2LDs was avoided. I.e. co.nz, ac.nz, govt.nz rather than com.nz, edu.nz, gov.nz. But then we went and did mil.nz and org.nz anyway, sigh. 3. In the best tradition of monosyllabic gutteral, and 'ls' rather than 'dir', we preferred shorter names ('co' vs 'com', 'ac' vs 'edu'). :-) The other reason for avoiding com.nz was as set out in (2)---and for whatever reason it appears many other registries also preferred co.xx to com.xx. 4. At that time, JANET used uk.ac.oxford.law.host1 and the US used host1.law.yale.edu. Email clients had to figure out the endianness of addresses by inspection. Thus, we *suggested* that no host ever use the ISO 2 letter country code or any of the three letter TLDs. That way we would not get hopelessly confused by fr.ac.uk (is that in France or the Great Britain?) As the net has evolved, the deep structure in the DNS is rarely used. Some countries have allowed organisation.tld rather than organisation.2ld.tld; .com has become the tld of choice, and very rarely do we see names like host.org-unit.org-unit.org-unit.org.2ld.tld etc. So maybe it's time to drop tlds in .nz, but until then, fwiw, I oppose .bank.nz as being unnecessary---and support .geek.nz :-) Actually, I still like the structured approach, and prefer a limited number of sane 2lds, but maybe I'm kicking against the pricks here. -- Michael Newbery IP Architect TelstraClear Limited - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog