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Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

I work with US state governments a lot. Departments treasure their .com domains because they can actually get updates to the zone file without having to go through months (literally) of repeated requests to get something added to the .<state>.gov/us domain. If a department or agency has to reach outside to the state IT department for anything the timeline doubles or triples. It’s a real problem.

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I used to do lots of consulting work for various departments and agencies in the state I was in at the time. The biggest issue was that the state IT department wanted everything centralized, running on only department servers, using a single platform chosen by them (Vignette StoryServer). Most agencies found that to be too restrictive, especially since at the time Vignette only used TCL.

Even worse was the IT department's insistence that agencies sign a 99 year contract for cost sharing, the amount of which would never be known in advance since it would only be calculated quarterly based on all expenses the state IT department incurred hosting state agencies.

Same for the enterprise (non-tech I assume) world. When I was on the business side, we treasured any compute we could get that was not tied to corporate IT. Going through them would turn a 1 day fix into a 2 week endeavor. Product development would go from 1 month to 6 or more.

Yes. I remember the delight of deploying my first server with a credit card. The previous one had taken 6 weeks and $100,000 out of our department budget. Such a godsend.

You've found out a huge reason cloud took off so hard. Lots of it is shadow-IT.

Nobody except a few universities actually uses subdomains as they should be, where you actually delegate the subdomain to the business unit using it.

I tried to access gettysburg.edu the other day and was greeted by a stupid redirect page (with a meta refresh tag) insisting on use of www rather than just issuing the redirect immediately.

The reality is they're stuck in 1995 and won't make rational changes.

I think someone extremely rational is making a lot of big changes and I could not be more excited to see the outcome.

Do you mean that all .gov domains are handled by the same dns service provider? I can understand if the TLD registry is a pain to deal with when it comes to changing information at the top, but zones files? The whole design of dns have delegation as a central feature so that the registry do not need to do everything.

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