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From: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid)
Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: mail and news in Europe
Message-ID: <228@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk>
Date: 26 Jun 89 10:40:21 GMT
References: <786@redsox.bsw.com> <928@sering.cwi.nl> <WISNER.89Jun23144304@anableps.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@cs.strath.ac.uk
Reply-To: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk
Organization: Comp. Sci. Dept., Strathclyde Univ., Scotland.
Lines: 43

In article <WISNER.89Jun23144304@anableps.berkeley.edu> wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) writes:
>Who administers the top-level domains in Europe?

Each European country has at least one site administering that country's
domain. In some cases, there are two or more sites claiming authority
for the same domain on different networks!

>						 If they are maintained by
>EUnet/EUUG, do only EUUG members get to join those domains?

No. If the site is using UUCP on EUnet, it is supposed to be a member of
the EUUG. The national backbone in each country maintains their own
domain tables. They may also provide name mappings for other sites that
are on different networks [eg X.400, Bitnet].

>							Or, to be more
>succinct, if a company in Outer Boondocks, West Germany polls the US to get
>its own mail, will it be allowed to become company.de?

No reason why not, provided the site is able to persuade a network
authority to register their name. This might not be so easy as it sounds.
If someone on that network has assumed responsibility for say the .de
domain, your site might only be allowed to register through whoever is
the authority for that domain. 

For the example you give, if the company wants to register as a UUCP site 
under the German domain, it would probably have to register through the
German UUCP backbone.

>Now that several European countries (including France, Denmark, The
>Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland) are directly connected to the
>Internet, will NNTP help bring down the costs of getting news into Europe?

Not really. The major cost is the bit of wire that crosses the Atlantic
and how it is used. This depends mainly on the charging policies of the
various PTTs. The actual transport protocol used won't make much
difference. In some cases, NNTP would be no help at all. For instance,
the UK Academic community has free access to the Internet through a
gateway in London. The gateway only provides telnet, ftp and mail
service. It won't support NNTP or IP-level routing, so you can't get
news that way even if you wanted to.

		Jim