I was happily watching the hockey playoffs just now (well, as happily as possible without Hockey Night in Canada), and noticed a commercial for U.S. Navy Recruiting.
Why why why why why are they in .COM?!
I think we should be told.
Sean.
The Navy Recruiting web site, and all the other Navy Recruiting stuff - print, TV, radio, etc - is produced by an advertising agency. Apparently a lot of the Navy recruiting effort is out sourced. While I did not contribute to the decision making with regard to the choice of domain (it was decided before the agency awarded the hosting contract to us), I asked the people here who work with the agency on the contract if they knew why the agency decided on a .com domain instead of a .mil or .gov. So what follows is hearsay... Apparently there was a lot of consideration given to the domain name for the web site and after some debate over using the existing navy.mil or a new .com it was decided to go with a new .com domain. Aside from the complications arising from getting the navy's cooperation with regard to having a commercial organization running a web site in the navy.mil domain from a technical standpoint, from the ad agencies point of view there was a desire to keep the recruiting web site operations as separate from any military operations as possible for a bunch of logistical and bureaucratic reasons. John Riordan Interport Communications Corp.