From: bdb@becker.GTS.ORG (Bruce Becker)
Subject: Re: Domain naming conventions
Organization: G. T. S., Toronto, Ontario
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 03:01:18 GMT

In article <C0DG0w.G95@uunet.ca> smd@uunet.ca (Sean Doran) writes:
|sl@wimsey.bc.ca (Stuart Lynne) writes:
|
|>First the US domain appears to be more than willing to work with 
|>private individuals. The CA guidelines seem to want an organization.
|
|Yes, this is the impression I have too.  Not only that, but the CA-DOM
|committee seems to think in terms of large organizations where formal
|titles are used, and directors and managers loom at every level.
|
|This is an unrealistic view given the privatization of the Internet,
|and the growth of connectivity among smaller and less formal
|organizations.
|
|In order to get a domain approved, we had to have a client of ours
|make up titles for their Tech and Admin contacts, because the
|committee would not grok the fact that small companies don't always
|use formal titles at all, let alone ones like "Systems Analyst" or
|"IBM Mainframe Support Manager" or "Project Leader".
|
|We have also had troubles where very highly R&D oriented companies
|with non-standard titles and hierarchies have been asked to revise
|their list of contacts, because the Admin-Contact didn't have a title
|that sounded impressive or permanent enough for the committee. 


	I had exactly this problem - the "technical"
	person here has the title of "Guru", and the
	"administrator" is the "Heffalump".  The committee
	appeared to handle this irreverence by not dealing
	with my application for months, then providing
	another locational referent (more local) than what
	was requested, and did not bother to mention
	that they were doing this.


	The resulting domain name was completely
	useless to me as I maintained connections as
	far away as Windsor - so I ended up getting
	a ".org" domain and cancelling the ".ca" one.
	This actually was a better choice since I
	ended up gatewaying email/news with German &
	US sites, so no geographical referents were
	entirely appropriate.


	In hindsight I would have been less insulted
	if there had been some sort of dialog about
	whatever mysterious policy issues were at stake
	for the committee - as it was, my frustrations
	were filtered thru a helpful person who ended
	up in the middle of disagreements instead of
	feeling that they had helped; poor payment
	for the effort they had gone to.


	We are part of the creation of a new world
	with its own structure & places, where geography
	doen't always work as a measure of place - once
	the connection to Germany was made, the distance
	between the 2 locations was definitely shortened
	in a way not possible in geographic space.
	When that connection became inactive, distance
	changed again - the plasticity of this kind of
	space can't really be expressed well by cities,
	provinces, streets, or similar static references.


	The fluidity implied by this is mind-boggling;
	everything seems relative to everything else,
	so it does seem convenient to try to use some
	static means to pin it down - geography just
	doesn't seem like the right way to do that...


-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker			Toronto, Ontario
a /i/	 Internet: bdb@becker.gts.org	Uucp: ...!web!becker!bdb
 `\o\-e  "...symbolising Excitement and Fun."		
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Newsgroups: can.domain