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