register esa.ch

- To all you gentlemen who have contributed to the discussion so far -

As ESA-internal coordinator of domains and naming structure, I am obviously
not too pleased to see another organisation use the same acronym, but I don't
believe that this necessarily causes major problems.

This is because of the following. In addition to adopting the registration
policy recommended to us by RIPE, namely to register in each country esa.<TLD>,
we have established a further convention. Underneath the esa.<TLD>, the name of
the ESA establishment is added as a further subdomain in all cases, e.g.

   estec.esa.nl
   esoc.esa.de
   esrin.esa.it, etc.

This implies that chances of a clash in domain names are *very* small.

Furthermore, ESA has currently no establishments in CH and therefore no
intention to register esa.ch. For the hypothetical case where this would
happen, the question remains for me if and how the responsibility for a
2nd-level subdomain can be shared and coordinated between two organisations?
Btw, I also know about another potential conflict coming up - I've heard
of plans within Germany to align 2nd-level domain names with the regional
abbreviations known to all from German car plates - e.g. K for Cologne,
DA for Darmstadt, etc. Assuming that we as international organisation could
stay out of this scheme and retain esa.de, this would cause a clash with
the region of Eisenach (also ESA), and the same considerations as above
would apply.

Comments/Suggestions welcome!

Regards,

Walter

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