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Comment by bonyt | Hacker News Reader

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego.

> Yes, you read that right: houston.gov, losangeles.gov, newyorkcity.gov, and philadelphia.gov are all still available. As is the .gov for San Jose, Calif., the economic, cultural and political center of Silicon Valley.

A minor nit: Many of these cities do have a .gov domain. For example, NYC has nyc.gov. So, I would suspect (or I’d hope) the GSA wouldn’t issue newyorkcity.gov to a random fraudster as easily.

Houston has houstontx.gov.

Philadelphia has phila.gov.

San Jose has sanjoseca.gov.

LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected.

Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov.

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> Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov.

This reminds me of how longwinded the domain hierarchy for .us originally was. In MN (not sure if it's the same for every state), city domains were "www.ci.cityname.mn.us". Then the school district's web site was "www.cityname.k12.mn.us". Not only was the order inconsistent (why not www.k12.cityname etc.?) but sometimes the city might be typed differently - i.e. the main Minneapolis site had "minneapolis" in the domain, but the school district had "mpls".

In the primordial days of the web, back before good search engines, this didn't make it very easy to find the school's web site.

Fortunately many governments realized this and moved once .gov became available to cities & states. (or they just used .org). For instance Minneapolis uses minneapolismn.gov, but many are still on the old style domains. The school district uses mpls.k12.mn.us, but at least they've dropped the "www."

those are called .us locality domains.

ci.<locality name>.<state>.us is assigned to the city, there are several other similarly non-obvious assignments, anyone is permitted to register one.

I found this page that talks about it more: http://telecafe.org/smw/.US_Locality_Domains

In Norway, people employed by the local municipalities have email adresses that are literally of the style

  $firstname[.$middlename].$lastname@employee.$municipalityName.municipality.no

where "employee" and "municipality" are literal strings (in Norwegian) and the others are variables. It's incredible, I've seen people with 50 character long email addresses.

If you want to reschedule your Canadian citizenship ceremony, this is the address to email: RCC.DNCitSCRScheduling-ConvocationSCRCitRN.IRCC@cic.gc.ca

Looks like part of that might be attempting to craft a bilingual email address? This kind of thing is tough to get right— in many cases the easiest thing is to just make up a word that's understandable in both languages but isn't obviously preferential to either, like how the transit agency in Ottawa is called "OC Transpo".

On the other hand, for email addresses in particular, it should be easy to just have one in each language, which also makes sense in terms of the person replying knowing upfront which language you'd like to use based on which address your query came in on.

They could/should just use an alias where both email address point to the same inbox and would solve that issue in 2 minutes.

Exactly. Belgium is trilingual and just makes aliases, even to domain names.

Why is that incredible? It is pretty common for many institutions to have that kind of email. Universities for instance often have similar emails so that just by looking at the email you know if the person is a teacher / student / temp worker and which chair they belong to, sometimes which campus in addition.

Many big companies have similar things to identify the BU of the email holder or indicate a contractor status (helpful for security policies).

I don't know, I guess in the industries I work it's much more common to have emails that are somewhat unpredictable, like mide54@corp.com

Some unis. I had the three letter username (helps my name starts with W) at Berkeley. You could pick anything you wanted.

it's not common to have such a long email

School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple.

> School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple.

School districts may or may not be subordinate to city or county governments, and this may not be consistent state wide (of course, he heirarchy of city vs county may not be consistent statewide—looking at NYC.)

More confusingly, our legislature has used a Mongolian domain name. Looks like they (mostly) have redirects set up now: http://www.leg.mn

School districts are not always subsets of cities. Sometimes they even cross town, county, parish, or township lines.

The city of Lafayette's police department (in the SF East Bay) accepts crime tip emails using a Gmail address (94549TIP@gmail.com). It's plastered on all their police cars, even though the city and police department have an official domain. Though even that is a .org domain, lovelafayette.org.

So an email address that looks like a fraud (or just random) and a domain name that looks like a porn site.

94549 is their city zip code. And a palindrome.

> And a palindrome.

spilled my coffee

Yep, growing up in Lafayette the teachers always said, no reason not to remember, you only need to learn three digits.

Well presumably one would not be feeling much “Love Lafayette” when reporting crimes.

... but they would want to get the government, the "gman" involved - so "gmail" fits perfectly!

I would assume the LA City one was chosen because it’s still shorter than Los Angeles and it also differentiates from LA County. Much of the LA metropolitan area is within the county limits but not part of the city of LA.

I would think it also needs to differentiate from Louisiana.

yeah, the county website is likewise https://www.lacounty.gov/

The issue with lacity.org is the TLD, which creates confusion amongst the general public.

Legitimate domains for government entities should ALL be on .gov, which should be rigorously controlled.

Then I can tell my family to trust any .gov site, and assume that anything else is fraudulent.

lacity.org undermines this.

Tell your family never to trust any site no matter the domain, sites are hacked too easily.

You'd be better off telling your family to distrust .gov sites by default.

Could be also because they have lots of Spanish speakers? La ciudad == the city, Spanglish la city, :)

> LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected

Vs lacounty.gov I guess?

vs lastate.gov aka Louisiana

or losangeles.ca.gov would be neat

LA gov doesn't belong to CA gov, federalism, etc.

> LA gov doesn't belong to CA gov, federalism, etc.

Federalism does not exist within states but between states and the federal government. Los Angeles (whether county or city) is an administrative subdivision of the State of California, not an separate sovereignty.

OTOH, Los Angeles isn't getting a .ca.gov domain because the state government doesn't want to dilute it's brand with local government websites, but that's about branding, not Federalism.

There's not federalism within states in a legal sense the way there is between states and the feds, but cities value their independence too and prefer to have their own infrastructure. I would expect the city, rather than the state, to be the reason they don't use a subdomain of the state's .gov domain.

While it is true that federalism is a wrong term, but there exists a general idea of independence of different levels of government. I am not sure about US constitutional arrangement, but in country where i live there there is clear and explicit concept that municipal, province and country (executive) governments are independent of each other, not subordinate. Therefore, it would be inappropriate for city to get a subdomain managed by higher-level government entity.

In the united states, municipalities are subordinate to the state (equivalent to province). They generally have charters outlining distinct areas of responsibility, but usually to change the scope of that responsibility requires legislation at the state level. At each level the executive, judicial and legislative branches are separate.

The relationship between states and localities is governed by the constitution and laws of each individual state and not the US Constitution.

In my particular state, and in many but not all others, local governments whether that be counties, cities or towns are administrative districts which only have the rights and powers which the state chooses to delegate to them through state law and the particular charter granted by the state to the administrative district. The state through the normal legislative process can change those rights and powers or even eliminate a particular administrative district.

Perhaps Los Angeles and Louisiana have a truce where neither one takes la.gov

We have a TLD for NYC. It is, expectedly, not used for the city's official website. I guess people don't know how to visit TLDs in their browser. (I believe it would be "nyc.")

That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. Here's an example of how it's used: https://thecity.nyc/

> That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name.

While it is prohibited by the ICANN policy [1], it is not strictly enforced so that there are multiple TLDs with A/AAAA records. They traditionally could be resolved with a trailing dot (thus it is not a dotless host name, that would have no dot), but nowadays many browsers refuse to resolve them without an explicit scheme. But they do still exist: try `http://pn./` for example.

[1] https://serverfault.com/a/907228

HN doesn't like your link's formatting. Try: http://www.pn./ or http://www.pn/

This unintentionally makes a point about how hard these domains are to use; they're not supported very well.

The problem is the closing ` is being treated as part of the URL.

Your .pn link doesn't work for me without www part.

At least for https://www.fi/ the case is that someone registered "www" as the domain name in the early days.

Hmm, I guess the current browsers simply don't like such domain and automatically put www. At the very least, the Google DNS gives the following:

    ai. 209.59.119.34
    cm. 195.24.205.60
    dk. 193.163.102.58
    gg. 87.117.196.80
    je. 87.117.196.80
    pn. 80.68.93.100
    tk. 217.119.57.22
    uz. 91.212.89.8
    ws. 64.70.19.33

But I agree that these domains are now out of luck, given that browsers no longer even remotely support them.

I see that the Vatican has given up. Long ago, http://va/ was it. No other name under va existed. Netscape Navigator was able to navigate to that part of the net.

It really did make sense for such a tiny place.

http://ai./ is a better example.

both pn and ai are giving me DNS errors in chrome on ubuntu.

The DNS server at work (which I maintain... oops) doesn't work, but home and other servers do work:

  host ai. 1.1.1.1
  Using domain server:
  Name: 1.1.1.1
  Address: 1.1.1.1#53
  Aliases:
  
  ai has address 209.59.119.34
  ai mail is handled by 10 mail.offshore.ai.

This prohibition only applies to gTLDs. It does not apply to ccTLDs.

Aha, thank you for pointing it out---I actually overlooked a very informational RFC that says exactly this [1].

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7085

I mean, someone made some policy that says that... but it would be fun! Do people still have fun these days?

The reasons why these don't work go much belong policy. Let's say that you're trying to advertise city social services in a subway ad campaign; how in the world do you get people to go to just "nyc" as the domain name? I guarantee you most of them will end up just performing a search on "nyc". It simply doesn't work. When you put nyc.gov as the domain name, everyone knows what that is and how to navigate to it.

Secondly, we have the expectation that subdomains of a given domain are run by the same entity, and represent natural semantic subdivisions. E.g. there's google.com, the over-arching website for all of Google and its first major product, and then for its other major products there's maps.google.com, mail.google.com, docs.google.com, etc.

This doesn't work with nyc, because subdomains of nyc are actually registrable domain names all their own that are controlled by other entities. So you can't have nyc be the overarching website for NYC, and then have parks.nyc, housing.nyc, business.nyc, etc., as natural subdivisions of it, because other people can own those domain names! So now you have no great way to subdivide up your site, and other people's sites are easily confusable as yours.

The only real way to do a dotless root DNS website is if you control the entire TLD; it has to be closed and not open to registration by external parties.

https://nyc.nyc, so good they domain named it twice...

Missed opportunity for ny.ny

Nope, two character TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs, and New York definitely isn't a country.

> LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected.

It needs disambiguation because of Louisiana, while "Los Angeles" is more heavily in the collective conscious

Just because the cities have .gov domains does not counter the fact that the other, very official looking, domains are unused and potentially available.

Sure, but the sentence:

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego.

Is factually wrong.

My township (step below city) has a .com domain.

Is moldbug your mayor/ceo?

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