Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

[ag4ve.us at gmail.com (shawn wilson)]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.us> wrote:

> 3. Set a target date for the removal of those TLDs for 10 years in the
> future
>

Because this worked for IPv6?

> Obviously there are various implementation details for effecting the move,
> but application-layer stuff will be as obvious to most readers as it is
> off-topic for this list.
>

In this case, it's all about the "application-layer stuff" - that'd be
the stuff to fail hard - mainframe IP gateways, control systems,
Lotus, Domino, etc. BIND is fine. Even most of the PHP apps would
(should, maybe) be fine. But that's not runs most of the gov.

> Regarding the time period in #3, decommissioning a TLD is harder than you
> might think, and we have plenty of extant examples of others that have taken
> longer, and/or haven't finished yet *cough*su*cough*.
>

Do we really have any prior examples that are even .1 the size of the
usgov public system? Again, I'm not just referring to BIND and Windows
DNS (and probably some Netware 4 etc stuff) - this would be web, soap
parsers, email systems, vpn, and all of their clients (public,
contractor, and gov). Anything close to what y'all are talking about?