On Mon, 12 May 1997 09:50:48 -0400 carl@oppedahl.com (Carl Oppedahl) wrote: [...]
As I am sure you are also aware, the present structure of the .US domain is unworkable for any business that is located in more than one state, or for any business that thinks it might ever move from one state to another.
Since over the past many decades, having to use a specific street address in a specific city and state hasn't been "unworkable" for multinational corporations to do business anywhere, I hardly think that a .US domain address should be any different. I am not aware of any restrictions in the .US domain spec that says you have to restrict your Internet business or Internet operational reach to any locality. Likewise, businesses have moved from one state to another in the past and the change of address has not been "unworkable." Difficult sometimes and inconvenient often, but not unworkable.
There ought to be a .com.us, for example, and at present there isn't one.
The US is different from most other nations in that we have a federation of states, a specific internal division of several semi-autonomous political and geographic entities to divide things down to more manageable size. Besides, it helps deepen the DNS heirarchy. In a nation of our size and economic activity, that is very helpful and perhaps necessary. Creating .com.us does very little to help the name overlap problems we see in the current .com domain. It just adds 3 more characters to most of the domain names. Ya picks your system: geographic heirarchy (.US), category types (IAHC), even Barry Shein's phone number system, and ya gets your goods and your bads. It all depends on which problems you care most about solving. None of the systems does them all. None of them can be classified as "unworkable." -- Dennis Fazio Minnesota Regional Network -- Gabnet: (612) 362-5850