From: woods@robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Subject: Re: Reserving a sitename under .ca with a "blanket application"
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
Summary: Why bother?  ".CA" seems un-suitable for non-institutions anyway.
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 93 17:06:12 GMT

In article <1993Jan2.213523.28582@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca> timk@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca (Tim Kuehn) writes:
> What I would like to see would be a way to reserve a standard 
> organization name for all geographic sites under .ca. Then, when 

I think Tim's misleading or confusing us(/me?) a wee bit by opening
his discussion in this way, then concluding with:

> While I like the idea of registering the sites under ".ca" in order to get 
> a consistent geo-political naming convention, the possibility of having to 
> submit an application for each and every site makes me lean more in favor 
> of going under ".org", barring an amendable "blanket application" process 
> which would greatly facilitate the assignment of domains for trans-canada 
> and international organizations.

I am, after all the years since the formation of the CA domain, still
at a great loss to understand why any entity not specifically tied to a
given geographical area would even consider registering in a
geographical domain!

Such domains seem to make some degree of sense for government agencies
(including educational institutions, etc.).

However, for all the rest of us, being tied to geographical domain
seems to be a wee bit odd.  On the other hand, perhaps those of you
who've never been transplanted between cities, or even provinces,
might not have a problem with this.  For me however, I'd be loath to
register a "personal" domain name in a geographical sub-domain, never
mind what I think of registering a corporate entity as such (even one
incorporated in a specific province!).

Anyway, it seems to me that at least half of the folks participating
in this discussion wouldn't have to bother if they registered in one
of the non-geographical sub-domains (i.e. ".org", or ".com")!

Finally, I've a couple of comments on specific items in Tim's post:

First, I think that "blanket" applications are an answer to the wrong
problem (see my discussion above!).

> 	city.prov.ca.orgname.org 	for Canadian sites, and 
> 	city.ua.orgname.org 		for Ukranian sites
> 	city.gtm.orgname.org 		for Guatemalan sites

Or, if you're smart enough to just register "orgname.org", then you
can control your own sub-domain, and thus create any naming scheme
underneath that makes sense for your organization:

	department.division.orgname.org
	site.orgname.org
	site.city.orgname.org
	city.orgname.org

Or whatever.....  Just so long as you properly configure your domain
gateway mailer to understand your particular situation.

> 3) Having a domain under ".org" should make it easier to deal with all 
>    admin, network connections, and forwarding at the central site 
>    responsible for the ".orgname.org" domain.

Having a non-geographical domain name also makes moving between
geographical regions, or even expanding into new regions a non-issue!
From what I understand, it also means you can simply add new MX'ers in
the new region to add new gateways to your domain, and additionally
not having to have complex schemes to contain inter-sub-domain mail on
private links.

> 5) Using the ".org" would result in having to use a naming convention which 
>    is the exact opposite of the convention used under the ".ca" naming 
>    convention. Such "counter-to-convention" naming practices should be 
>    avoided if at all possible.

I'd also like to point out that the *original* domain names (eg.
".mil", ".edu", ".net", ".gov", etc.) seemed to lend themselves to an
exactly "counter-to-non-email-convention" scheme (eg.
"site.dept.univ.edu"), and that such a logical naming scheme so
confused my British cousins that they went and reversed it right off!
Now we Canuck's are doing the same thing, but without a national
mandate to be one way or another!

I'd suggest that anyone who has trouble with policies in any/all of the
existing domains should campaign for the formation of a new top-level
domain such as ".pri" (or ".priv"), rather than try to inflict change
in an existing domain which may have been set up for quite specific
purposes.
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@robohack.UUCP, woods@Elegant.COM  VE3TCP	UniForum Canada & ECI
+1 416 443-1734 [home] +1 416 362-XRSA [work]	Toronto, Ontario; CANADA
Newsgroups: can.domain