🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BsFHvA.Fvv@comp.vuw.ac.nz>, mark@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Mark Davies)
 writes:
> 
> In article <hammett.712875626@sbsu1.aukuni.ac.nz>, hammett@sbsu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Tim Hammett) writes:
> |> What's the difference between .gen.nz & .org.nz? I thought the equivalent
> |> of the US .org in NZ was .gen.nz. If this is not the case, then .gen.nz
> |> should have been called something more descriptive, like .bbs.nz.
> 
> Actually, I would say that that "loose" mapping was:
> 
> 		NZ		US
> 	     .org.nz	->	.org
> 	     .gen.nz	->	.us

That's my understanding of it too, though I'm not sure the
meaning of .us is entirely certain - the main intention was
that gen.nz is for names that are not for institutions
but rather `private' use (or for operations that support
individual access).

So at present we have:

  ac.nz.	"academic community" (schools, tertiary education institutions)
  cri.nz.	Crown Research Institues
  co.nz.	Commercial organisations
  govt.nz.	Government institutions
  mil.nz.	Military institutions
  net.nz.	Network organisations or services
  org.nz.	Organisations that are none of, or some mixture of the above
  gen.nz.	Private users or providers for private users
  archie.nz	the archie service 

These is a resemblance to the top level domains of course, though
we did try to avoid two letter names (as they can under
abbreviation completion rules collide with national top levels) and
similarly the top level three letter names (these aren't supposed
to be exclusively US domains, but that's another story).  As you
can see we didn't avoid AC (because we had used it in the "Coloured
Book" address space perhaps), CO, MIL, NET or ORG - we didn't
really avoid much.

Clearly it is sensible to have an expectation of at least two
names within a level of the DNS, but there is also a view that
there shouldn't be a `large' number at the NZ level (other
countries may have a different approach, but a number have
something of a structure within their national domain - in
any case we can make up our own minds on how we'd like NZ
set out).

A question we have then, is whether the domains we have in NZ now
are already as many as we should have (perhaps saying we should
have a similar number to the three letter top levels, or some other
argument about quantity), and/or are somehow special or orthogonal
and there can be no others, or whether we allow new domains in NZ
to be created under some policy (the extreme case being essentially
no policy, i.e. anything goes, first-in-first-served).  An
advantage of fixing the domains to those we have now is that we
don't have the problem or working out a policy (given we're not
keen on the trivial policy option), a disadvantage is that in some
sense we have `customers' to please as best we can, and we may turn
these away with dogmatism (for example the IAC might not like
org.nz and I know they are considering the INT top level).

Thanks for you comments, keep them coming
John