John Riordan gave a good probable reason behind the choice,
hearsay or not, and it matches both MAP's and several other
people's public and private speculations.
(Though I did like the comments about military-industrial
complex conspiracies, the military being privatized, and the
Great Conspiracy by Yet Another Branch of the US Government
to Put Money Into SAIC's Pockets $50 at a Time).
I'd like to take a quick poll of feelings about this sort
of thing.
Many organizations (mine included) have in the past gone
for numbers of domain-names, each reflecting some different
operating unit or other. A number of these happen because
of technical concerns on the part of the holder of a more
generic domain, or because of concerns about bureaucratic
such-and-so on the part of the people looking for a subdomain.
Looking around a bit, completely unscientifically and without
more than eyeballing things, it appears that this practice
is continuing, despite the back-pressure of a registration
fee levied by the InterNIC.
I was wondering if, firstly, anybody else thinks that
having many second-level domains per company is a real
issue on any front, and whether it really needs fixing
by perhaps us suggesting that subsequent domains be
charged on an exponential scale, with proceeds going
into the costs of maintaining the worldwide DNS, particularly
with respect to user-and-administrator education.
Note that I shall happily ignore the question of who
we should suggest this to, or who "we" should be
(NANOG or I*-something-or-other); I'm just wondering
if I'm completely out-to-lunch on this one.
Also I shall happily ignore the issue of how one decides
which organizations are considered part of the same <splat>
of operations/control/management/ownership, as there be
ratholes lurking there. However, I'd like to see something
that handles not only <eighty-product-names>.COM being
registered by one party, but also <eighty-quasi-independent-orgs>.COM,
all clearly able to fit (at least for the moment) into
<eighty-subdomains>.BigCompany.COM.
The "(for now)" is key; some of the interesting things seen
in the past has included people rushing out and grabbing
lots of similar-sounding domains prior to a naming decision
of a new spin-off-company being made by its board of directors,
and also lots of rushing out and acquiring domains by products
which think that they _might_, some day, be spun off into
completely independent entities.
If people think this sort of thing is OK, I'll shut up now.
If not, I'm interested in hearing about it.
Sean.
