On 24 May 2000, Simon Lyall wrote:

On Wed, 24 May 2000, Andy Linton wrote:

...

Except to note that it's not necessary and in fact simply causes confusion. For example, if you wanted to contact Paradise (the ISP) would you choose paradise.co.nz or paradise.net.nz? Now make the choice as a naive user.

Of course if they pick www.paradise.gen.nz then they might really have a problem.

...

With the benefit of hindsight I'd advocate that it's all a crock and a single domain, .nz is all we need.

It does have the advantage in letting "clashing" names have an alternative. This is especially good since if your name is Mcdonald or Harrods then if you take a .gen.nz or .org.nz domain then it is automaticly assumed to be personal rather than taking a shot at the big boys.

As I recall, the intent was also to delegate authority. Thus the owner of .mil.nz would accept only suitably armed and dangerous organisations. The Universities, who were de facto running ".nz" thought they might be considered presumtuous if they allocated all sub-domains, and even then we did not consider it part of our 'core' business. As it happened of course, we ended up doing it for everyone anyway, pretty much. Bear in mind that this was the time of GOSIP, when Standards NZ wanted a large number of thousands of dollars, per year, to assign you an X.121 address. Countries coming to the Internet somewhat later have had the benefit of experience and have sometimes chosen different schemes. Another consideration was that in the VERY early days, we had big and little endian addresses (JANET style nz.ac.vuw vs Internet style vuw.ac.nz), and since NZ had Spearnet (Coloured book, JANET derived protocols) and TCP style addressing simultaneously for a while, PLUS the BITNET link between Auckland and VUW, plus uucp bang paths, plus Compuserve (remember them :-) we tried to make names unambigous under several transformations. That was one reason we explicitly chose 2LDs that were *not* gov, com or edu. By the time mil.nz and org.nz were necessary, this was no longer considered a problem. -- Michael Newbery Technology Manager Saturn Communications Tel: +64-4-939 5102 Mobile:021-642 957 Fax:+64-4-939 5100 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog