piet@cwi.nl (Piet Beertema) (07/09/88)
NOTE: I hope I have correctly rejiggered the gateway routing to get this back through the gateway authorizations maze! Lovely to see my own address arriving here in such a short, "gateway-less" form. Internetworking ain't that difficult, EUnet in that respect has learned its lesson long ago. I want to applaud Piet's observations. Thanks. But I wish I wouldn't have had to make them. As said, internetworking ain't that difficult; and cooperation is even less difficult, iff there is the WILL. And I'm sorry to have noticed time and again that that will is lacking from the side of certain Europeans and European organisations. What is the problem with properly registering new domains and their becoming good citizens of the Internet Mail community? Of course there are no problems at all.... iff you don't think in terms of "US imperialism" and that sort of bullshit. Once again, the SRI is NOT an institute telling national authorities what they can and cannot do; it's a *clearing house* for domain registration. And it's exactly that sort of clearing house that - had it existed in Europe and cooperated with the Internet - could have prevented at least a) the .nl name clash a year or so ago and b) the ridiculous situation in Italy, where there are at least THREE .it top domains now, each organisation/network using it independently and claiming to have the "right" on it. I think Holland has given a good example of how things should be (or have been) done: .nl is recognized on EUnet, the Internet and EARN/BITNET; any user on any of those networks can reach me with the simple address piet@cwi.nl, without the need to specify gateways. And our X.400<->RFC822 mapping will keep it simple. How about setting up a Workshop Session at the upcoming IFIP WG6.5 Working Conference on MHS and Distributed Applications (Oct 10-12) in Southern California to attempt to resolve the issues about why all these X.400 Domains insist and persist in adopting unregistered internet names, and then actually join the internet with unregistered names? Well, some people will say "why again in the USA?". But it is my belief that by October the problem will no longer exist: Belgium and Spain have said they are in the process of top domain registration with the SRI; I know of other countries who are going to or about to do it. To my knowledge by then only Luxemburg and Turkey will not have registered their top domain with the SRI yet. Which is not to say that by then those top level domains will be shared and mutually recognized by ALL networks, like Internet, EARN, BITNET, EUnet, HEPNET, SPAN, the MHS networks, and others. That won't be the case, I fear. And by October the whole world won't be speaking X.400 yet; on the contrary! Piet