Do you think the US having .gov is unfair?

[incka]

Do you think the US having .gov is unfair?

Should they have .gov.us instead?

[Chris]

Creator's perogative.

[incka]

Despite the fact that dictionary.com tells me you spelt that wrong, why should ICANN give the US .com. The inventor of the world wide web as we know it today came from a British University.

I think they should be forced to change it to .gov.us, and .edu should be .edu.us, and .mil should be .mil.us and if they have any others do the same...

[MarkB]

Domain names did not appear when the Web appeared - they've been in use since the 70s (.gov, .edu etc).

[incka]

Still, I think they should be forced to change it. Them having .gov, etc. might make other countries angry at them.

[Chris]

ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet, was created by the US Dept. of Defense.

In anycase the idea for the WWW might have come from Tim Berners Lee but the US government (including publicly funded universities) basically created the Internet and the Web. ICANN exists at the behest of the US government. (http://www.icann.org/general/background.htm) The DNS system was originally created and controlled by the US government and was given to ICANN.

Changing things now wouldn't make any sense, there are far more weightier issues that countries can be mad at the US about than this, and changing things would not make any of the countries mad at us any less mad.

[Peter T Davis]

What purpose would be served by making this change anyway?