Re: U.S. Postal Service proposal: restricting domain names to street addresses

[Michael Sondow <msondow@ic.sunysb.edu>]

I fail to see the logic behind your arguments. If e-mail can go to a
street address, it is no more than a telegram. Why, then, has all the
trouble to set up networked digital communications be taken? Surely the
whole point to the Internet is that it serves two-way communication that
is not restricted by geography: you can get your e-mail anywhere, change
your e-mail address or your domain name from one ISP or server to
another, alias mail, bounce it, forward it at will.

If community groups wish to set up local (geographical) lists, nothing
is stopping them from walking around the heighborhood and collecting
people's e-mail addresses. It is not necessary, and would not work, for
the addresses to be somehow defined by the neighborhood. People move.
Others who live there, and by your argument would have an address with a
local definition, do not want to be in the community group.

Perhaps I should not have said "the spirit of universality", but rather
"the spirit of extra-territoriality", for surely it is this spirit which
has acted as a game plan, a foundation, for the extension of the
Internet over the earth. Communities are free to form, but they are not
restricted in their formation, not by color, not by religion, not by
age, not by sex, and no longer by neighborhood, or state.

                             
                               Michael Sondow



On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:

> Excerpts from cpsr.bulk: 14-Aug-98 U.S. Postal Service proposa.. Michael
> Sondow@ic.sunysb (894*)
> 
> > 	I am categorically opposed to all and any definition,
> > restriction, or limitation of domain names by geographical street
> > addresses. Such restriction is totally antithetical to the spirit of
> > universality of Internet communications. Better would be the
> > abandonment, internationally, of ccTLDs. 
> 
> I personally have a hard time seeing why you think this.  I think it
> would be very good for communities, for example, if you could send email
> to your neighbors by their street address, or set up mailing lists for
> everyone in your block or neighborhood.  How is this antithetical to the
> "spirit of universality"?  -- Nathaniel
> --------
> Unless all existence is a medium of revelation, no particular revelation is
> possible.	-- William Temple
> 
> Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb+faq@guppylake.com>
>