Edwin Groothuis [edwin§mavetju.org] wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 01:30:13PM +1000, Vic Cinc wrote:
> > > Can you name me one country, besides the .us domain which smarty
> > > chose state.us, which moved from a similar naming system as there
> > > is in Japan, the UK, Australia, Korea etc to a toplevel one?
> > 
> > france, italy, germany come to mind, there are plenty of others I am sure.
> 
> That is funny...
> 
> Take a random dutch company I was part of the DNS team of...
> 
> 	philips.it		created:     before 19960129
> 	philips.de		first usenet posting 1991
> 	philips.fr		first usenet posting 1993
> 
> Sorry, these ones didn't have 2nd level domains. They had "strange"
> rules (like having your DNS servers in the country of origin). You
> still owe me at least one which did.

.it had co.it  afaik .jp opened its top level.  some may have
had funny rules but they certainly freed them up. and even if they
allowed access to the top level domain with some restriction even
better. its still backs my argument that there is no valid reason not to
allow such access.

you can argue over the historical accuracy over which name space did what
when but it doesnt change the fact that australia for a wealthy country has one of the lowest
name space penetrations in the world.

the rules have significantly stagnated take up of names in australia. even a little
tiny country like belgium has a million names (double our numbers) with
half our population.

the continued disenfranchisement of the australia domain buying population
has to come to an end.

and on that point:

from afnic.fr "from 20 june  2006 afnic opens up .fr to individuals": well done .fr.

there are now no euro countries afaik that require a magic number for
registration. france the last euro domino just ditched the requirement.

when will australia?

Vic