POSTEL@USC-ISIB.ARPA (01/11/86)
Domain names are supposed to be administrative and not related to physical location, type of equipment, topology, or routing. That the initial step in establishing domain name was to say that all the existing hosts in the ARPA-Internet were in the .ARPA domain was probably a mistake. It is too easy for people to think that the ".ARPA" stands for the ARPANET rather than the ARPA administration. We probably should have called it ".TEMP" or ".OLD". It is very tempting for each communication world (such as, UUCP, CSNET, MAILNET, BITNET) to think of itself as a top level domain. And most such entities probably meet the general requirements, and would probably provide responsible management for the domain (maintaing the databases, etc.). But these entities really represent the managements of communication systems. It does not really seem appropriate to me to have my name depend on which communication system i am on, and it especially seems wrong that i would have as many different names as communication systems i subscribed to. For example, Berkeley participates in at least the ARPA world, the UUCP world, the BITNET world, and the CSNET world. It seems much more reasonable to pick names that are independent of the type of communication system, or protocols, or what ever technical details are involved. The general domain names of EDU (for Education), COM (for Commercial), etc, were chosen to be neutral. The idea is that a place like Berkeley can choose a name like BERKELEY.EDU and use that name in all the communication worlds it participates in. The details of the domain name database structure make this possible, and make possible the use of domain style names by hosts not directly on the ARPA-Internet. There is indeed some work involved, but not significantly more than is involved without the domain name system. --jon. -------