Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> Personally I have  nothing against .US (or .SE or  whatever) addresses as
> long as  they match your  organizational pattern. The Royal  Institute of
> Technology  in Stockholm  isn't leaving  Sweden anytime  soon, so  .SE is
> fine, and I suspect the same applies to your library. Having LSOFT.SE and
> LSOFT.COM would  already be  a drag, but  if in addition  we had  to have
> subdomains for NY, NJ, DC and so on, it would be a ROYAL pain.
 
  Domain name assignments are an interesting mess 8-). In theory, the top-
level domain reflect's the organization's primary location, so there is a
host that's in the ericsson.se domain in Texas, some .mil sites are in
Europe, etc. So, you could use LSOFT.SE for all of your international offices
if you wanted to, unless you ran into some nationalistic places where the
administrators of the national network wanted you to use something else. You
would probably still have the option of running a private link back to your
home country if you wanted to. In practice, I don't know of any country that
actually insists on this sort of thing.
 
  But then it gets stranger. Some exclusively international sites show up
within the US-based domains (not .US, but things like .COM). There's a .COM
in Scotland, for example.
 
  Then, some countries adopt the US system, either partially or completely
(for example, .EDU.AU or .CO.UK).
 
  Of course, very little of this has anything to do with whether you can
get contact information from whois.internic.net...
 
  Back to the original subject, the .US domain was intended for smaller sites
where providing name service, etc. wasn't often practical. Since there needed
to be some way of handling the potential for subdividing the administration
of the .US domain, they decided the best way to assign names within it was to
use host-name.city-code.state-code.us. Unfortunately, many of the people who
desire this type of registration move, so some strangeness happens.
 
  The latest edition of the US domain specification is RFC1480.
 
        Terry Kennedy           Operations Manager, Academic Computing
        [log in to unmask]     St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
        [log in to unmask]    +1 201 915 9381