yeah, those came a little later, but 2000 was the first year ICANN was ready to accept proposals for TLDs beyond the original 7. They made a call for innovative new uses of the domain system. My colleagues proposed .geo, ICANN went with .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum.

Full list of proposals that year here: http://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/app-index.htm

Oh, I was joking about .moe, etc - I reckon .geo would be far more useful!

But my main question about the moon was quite serious - how would you access the moon with this? I couldn't quite understand how this part from the executive summary would translate to an actual DNS request:

"One special GeoRegistry must have a server assigned to every cell on the planet. This GeoRegistry will be called the default GeoRegistry named "earth." (The names of the other planets will be reserved for interplanetary geodata.) The default GeoRegistry will be used when client queries do not specify a GeoRegistry name, or when the specified GeoRegistry does not have an assigned cell server."

Kinda cool that .geo predates Google Maps by about 4 or 5 years!

the overall program also included a 3D terrain browser built on top of .geo that pre-dated Google Earth by 4 or 5 years.

http://www.ai.sri.com/digital-earth/

those were great times... sadly, the Principal Investigator passed away, one of the lead devs left the company for greener (for-profit) pastures, and the program was de-funded when DARPA priorities shifted post-9/11 and it all just kinda evaporated.

re: the moon - I honestly forget how that part was supposed to work....