John Riordan gave a good probable reason behind the choice, hearsay or not, and it matches both MAP's and several other people's public and private speculations. (Though I did like the comments about military-industrial complex conspiracies, the military being privatized, and the Great Conspiracy by Yet Another Branch of the US Government to Put Money Into SAIC's Pockets $50 at a Time). I'd like to take a quick poll of feelings about this sort of thing. Many organizations (mine included) have in the past gone for numbers of domain-names, each reflecting some different operating unit or other. A number of these happen because of technical concerns on the part of the holder of a more generic domain, or because of concerns about bureaucratic such-and-so on the part of the people looking for a subdomain. Looking around a bit, completely unscientifically and without more than eyeballing things, it appears that this practice is continuing, despite the back-pressure of a registration fee levied by the InterNIC. I was wondering if, firstly, anybody else thinks that having many second-level domains per company is a real issue on any front, and whether it really needs fixing by perhaps us suggesting that subsequent domains be charged on an exponential scale, with proceeds going into the costs of maintaining the worldwide DNS, particularly with respect to user-and-administrator education. Note that I shall happily ignore the question of who we should suggest this to, or who "we" should be (NANOG or I*-something-or-other); I'm just wondering if I'm completely out-to-lunch on this one. Also I shall happily ignore the issue of how one decides which organizations are considered part of the same <splat> of operations/control/management/ownership, as there be ratholes lurking there. However, I'd like to see something that handles not only <eighty-product-names>.COM being registered by one party, but also <eighty-quasi-independent-orgs>.COM, all clearly able to fit (at least for the moment) into <eighty-subdomains>.BigCompany.COM. The "(for now)" is key; some of the interesting things seen in the past has included people rushing out and grabbing lots of similar-sounding domains prior to a naming decision of a new spin-off-company being made by its board of directors, and also lots of rushing out and acquiring domains by products which think that they _might_, some day, be spun off into completely independent entities. If people think this sort of thing is OK, I'll shut up now. If not, I'm interested in hearing about it. Sean.