On Wed 25 Oct 2023 at 22:42:07 (-0400), Stefan Monnier wrote: > >> It's just such a shame that they chose a name which refers to "arpa" > >> in it, which is not only US-centric but even belongs to the US's war > >> department, which I find rather unpalatable. > >> I understand ARPA was closely related to the beginnings of the Internet, > >> but... couldn't they choose something a bit more neutral?
It's hardly surprising that the TLD of the ARPA Internet's naming system was called arpa. It kinda chose itself. And hardly surprising that it was US-centric as the ARPA Internet was a US commission. At the time, there was no global Internet to be neutral about: the ARPA Internet was one of several networks in the US, let alone in the world. DNS was running by at least 1983 (see RFCs 882/3), and I'm looking at an email from December 1986 sent from (I've concealed the name) foo%lpi.s...@star.stanford.edu%stanf...@uk.ac.rl.earn via Decnet, Arpanet and Bitnet, to Janet. I constructed a reverse address, and all went well for a few months, until I received an email: "During August messages were addressed to you from the Arpanet and came through the UCL Internet Gateway. Please take action to become a registered user of the Gateway as messages addressed to your address shown in the header may soon be blocked and thus will not get to you. No warning will be given." The guy at LPI had discovered he could send through a new gateway at UCL. Note that the backwards address "uk.ac.rl.earn" is not a DNS address but a Janet hierarchical name. Just as .arpa is a historical hangover from a long time ago, so is the .uk at the end of my address, which is a hangover from Janet's TLD "uk.", as seen above. > > It belongs to the Internet Architecture Board and is administered by > > IANA which is why they chose it. It stands for "Address and Routing > > Parameter Area” <https://www.iana.org/domains/arpa>. > > But that's a "backronym". > It originally referred to the US agency. > I totally understand the technical reasons why they decided to stick to > this naming, but it's still grating. I would have thought that techies understand its origins, and non-techies are fairly unlikely ever to encounter it. Cheers, David.
