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I believe the document I'm thinking of may have been RFC 1480

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)

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> ICANN DNS became a money grab

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.

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Fun fact (you probably remember), you used to report phishing sites with one simple email and they would actually be taken down.

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.

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Abuse handling is a mess. AFAIK, the registries, registrars, and ICANN all share responsibility in terms of mitigation. There’s no consistency.
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The entire domain squatting/parking industry exists because filing an ICANN dispute costs more than paying the squatter. Absolutely insane.
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looking at you Cloudflare

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.

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It’s a protection racket too. When they first launched generic tld’s, donuts(a shady registry) had a product that didn’t allow domain registration but -did- block registration of a domain across all tlds in case you didn’t want to pay for company-name.[200+ tlds]
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I still remember when they started charging for domains. Until late 1995, they were free.
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In hindsight, quite lucky it’s a California non profit. That allowed us to stop the dot-org sale.
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The hierarchical geographical domains you are remembering must have been the 2000 '.geo' Top Level Domain (TLD) proposal from SRI. It didn't work out, but I remember thinking at the time that it was a cool idea.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping

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