Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

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> But are web apps "apps"?

Both Google and Microsoft are both strongly in the "Yes" category here and are heavily pushing PWAs as a future of many types of apps. If a lot of PWAs also want to use .app as their TLD, that serves Google's purposes just fine, I'd imagine.

> Are Google going to be actively monitoring these to make sure the content is related to the .app TLD?

Where's the creativity in that? The internet decided a long time ago that it would rather do interesting things with TLDs than strictly enforce them; use the origins and "purpose" of a TLD as a loose guideline.

What's the harm in a restaurant deciding that .app fits their brand because they have the best apps (appetizers) in town?

Is it any worse than all the startups that have been using Chagos' country TLD .io without having anything to do with the atoll of Chagos? (Which of course is made worse by the funds from .io going to British corporate colonialists rather than directly to benefit anyone in Chagos. How many startups even think of that when paying for their hip domain name?)

Would Chagos get .io if it wasn't British Indian Ocean Territory?

Chagos is the preferred name for the atoll that the British named to be "their" Indian Ocean Territory in the colonial empire era.

Chagos should get direct control of .io, but it is a weird political fight.

One awareness campaign: http://www.thedarksideof.io/

I mean why would Chagos, free of ever having the British, end up with IO as a country code?

Well, there aren't any obvious alternatives, for one thing: .ch is Switzerland, .ca is Canada, etc.

I don't know, it's a problem for politicians and standards bodies. Even if not "British", Chagos is still inside the "Indian Ocean", so the reason for the country code remains.

Ok but that sort of takes away the entire argument that .io "belongs" to these people somehow. It doesn't, it's purely a political issue. It's not some natural resource or anything they'd have claim to otherwise. (And seems that Mauritius might have claim, meaning no extra ccTLD.)

It's fine if people want to raise awareness to Brits behaving badly. But saying .io should go to those people is misleading.

.vi is controlled directly by residents of the US Virgin Islands. The primary contact address is on St. Thomas, and the NIC follows some pretty restrictive domain naming rules to favor the residents of the US Virgin Islands. It's run by the local telecom and presumably all money generated from .vi revenue goes to the island economies.

That is much closer to the ccTLD original intent than any of the British territories have seen (.io, .vg, etc). It's not misleading to suggest that the territory control their own ccTLD's destiny, given that was the original presumption of the early IETF and many of the original NICs.

Of course it's not a "natural" resource as a digital artifact of the internet economy, but that doesn't mean the ccTLDs weren't intended to be a resource to a specific locality, and that that specific locality shouldn't most control or best benefit when that ccTLD is exploited by foreign interests find a different use/meaning/domain-hacks for that TLD.

.cs is free.

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