Michelle Malkin has an interesting post entitled “Document drop: The story behind Change.gov.”
The short version: The Government Services Agency initially denied the Obama transition team the domain “change.gov” on numerous grounds: 1) The name was too generic, violating “canonical” rules; 2) the name was political — a campaign slogan — and thus violated the rules for the .gov domain; and 3) Obama was not actually president or even, at the time of application, technically president-elect. Ultimately, upon appeal, they granted a waiver for no apparent reason.
Malkin provides detailed analysis including screencaps of the various emails and memeoranda exchanged as part of the process.
In the grand scheme of things, I don’t much care. Indeed, domain naming protocols have gotten so blurry in recent years that it never really dawned on me that change.gov was a government website. Still, the original reasons for denial of application strike me as reasonable, the reasons offered in the appeal were dubious, and no reasoning at all seems to have driven the change of heart at GSA.
