In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California
Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies
I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It "seemed like" Postel saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, any such non-commercial vision was not realised
ICANN DNS became a money grab
If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers
I like to pretend he would not but I have no idea
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt
If so, the other person was Ann W Cooper
AFAIK Cooper was never at SRI, but Postel was at one time
Putting aside the inaccurate memory, the point I wish to make as an ordinary computer user reading about the internet is that Postel wrote about the internet as a _public resource_. Check out the tone of this random Postel RFC, for example
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt
Postel received a PhD in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA and, apparently, he was a _two-finger typist_ who preferred handwritten slides over PowerPoint and used monochrome logos instead of color (I find this interesting; I'm not suggesting anyone else would)
Joyce K Reynolds, who co-authored some of the most important RFCs with Postel on protocols, was a social sciences major (another factoid I find interesting)
It’s too bad more people don’t understand how the domain industry is structured under ICANN. IMO, the registries are ICANN’s customers, the registrants are part of the product being sold, and the registrars are a liability shield.
One day there will be a grab for .com.
These days I get the feeling a lot of the registrars are essentially/effectively in on it (at least by inaction). A well-run ICANN feels needed, who can track takedown compliance.
Funnily enough years ago I did a takedown request for terrorist material, realised that the host was in the same building as me. So when the ticket got closed and they didn't make any changes. I walked into their office and showed them a lovely video they had on their network.
Suddenly they took action.
It would have provided geographical information based on a domain encoded grid, not for human but machine consumption (e.g. acme.2e5n.10e30n.geo).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.geo
In a similar vein there is the 'e164.arpa' domain for mapping telephone numbers.
In 2022, their TLS certificates were off -- a subdomain used by a backend redirect process was no longer valid, so I contacted "ML" and they were unresponsive. I managed to get my domains to a new register by ignoring some TLS warnings and transferring them. As of July of 2022, I have not heard from "ML" and I assume that he passed away. I don't know their identity or what became of them. All I know is that their name is/was Mark.
https://nationalpublicdata.com/people/l/mark-lord/nv/reno/pd...
Looks like you can reach him at mark84@gmail if you want to say ‘hi’.
I wonder if the whole thing was on auto-pilot until things eventually broke.
The last email address in your link, the sbcglobal one, is for someone else entirely. She's involved in the church in Springfield, IL. I assume that she got tied in by Mark's surname.
Naive question, what do you use the locality domain for?