Playing fast and loose with Internet domain registration.

This will probably be of interest to only my American readers, but it seems that the Bush administration has been pushing the envelope with respect to registering and using Internet domain names that are technically reserved only for official government use.

As an example, there is the perfectly legitimate Social Security site www.ssa.gov, which is (to the best of my knowledge) the official online web page for Social Security. On the other hand, there is the clearly partisan (that is, Republican) Strengthening Social Security site, which would seem to violate the spirit, if not the actual letter, of the restrictions for registration of ".gov" domains.

Another apparent violation is the blatantly Republican site gop.gov, and the latest outrage appears to be an inappropriate registration of a ".mil" domain -- America Supports You, which is again pretty clearly GOP-oriented, at least from my reading of it.

Would anyone like to comment on what is and is not technically acceptable usage for the ".gov" and ".mil" domains in the U.S.? And if the GOP wants to play games like this, why don't the Dems do the same thing? How about registering domains like "fiscallyresponsible.gov", or "fightingterrorism.gov", or whatever else they can come up with?

If the Repubs are going to be this sleazy in terms of absconding with official government domain names and the Dems can't stop them, they might as well get just as sleazy.