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

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

At 11:24 AM 8/14/98 -0400, Michael Sondow wrote:
>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? 

Actually, the idea, around our boardroom, was to install an envelope
stuffer, which would convert an email to a letter, in order to send e-mail
to folks (friends/relatives/family) who did not have e-mail at all. We
figured it to be a logistical nightmare, for us. Someone else may actually
get it to work. It should be reasonably profitable. Cheaper than a telegram
but more expensive than a letter, even if more convenient. Also, it's
really out of MHSC business scope and mission. There are other problems
wrt, file-attachments.<grin> MHSC wants 1% if you can make it work<grin>.

>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.

Here is the real problem. The work involved around address changes would be
emmense. Personally, I have moved between California, Texas, Ohio, and
Colorado, over 6 times, between 1989 and 1995. In order to keep things
straight, I wound up having to get a box at a "Mail Boxes Etc." (MBE)
because the postal service was not keeping up with me. I was getting mail
as much as a year late. Now, someone wants those same yahoos to maintain
the .US domain and geographical e-mail boxen? Who had *that* brain-fart?

Besides, one site with machines to automate the conversion, and an address
given my the user (only checked for format), stamp it, and put it in the
postal system. USPS will even give a special deal on postage, just like an
MBE. The whole shebanggy can be 98% automated.

Where in here is there a requirement for a physically located e-mail
address? The answer is that you don't need it. The whole idea has the
merits of a fart in a hurricane.

>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>
>> 
>

___________________________________________________ 
Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) 
e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer@mhsc.com>rmeyer@mhsc.com
Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com
Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/
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