Anyone remember the discussion years ago when a lot of people on the web (including the early github community and alike) stood up against the "misuse" of TLDs like .io and .tv?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians
I fairly often add "site:dk" to my Google searches. I know I'm excluding Danish sites using generic TLDs, or using Danish domain hacks¹, but it's usually good enough to get past the irrelevant results I didn't want.
Search engines can also use the CCTLD as part of the signalling -- a .dk site is almost certainly related to Denmark.
That doesn't work for .to, .nu, .cc and so on. (.IO is unusual, the only genuinely linked site I can see is the government's, at https://biot.gov.io/ ) Google has a list of CCTLDs it considers "generic"², I don't know if they have workarounds for sites actually linked to these places.
¹ "A/S" is a type of company registration, so American Samoa ".as" is used, "nu" means "now" so there's some use of Niue ".nu".
² https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#generic-...
Many of these have an English version in Denmark, which I understand much more easily.
Not-Denmark-but-English results are most of what I'm trying to exclude -- recipes full of sugar with measurements in Fahren-cups, restaurants in the three Copenhagens in North America, etc.
And .io is certainly worse than .org will ever be - there have been numerous security outages of the .io name servers and one very bad security incident: https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...
https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/letter-ly-abrupt-ly-loses-...
The only segregation that made a lot of sense was ".gov" and ".mil", so users could tell they were the real deal.
One if generic, the other is country specific.
.com and .net are both gtld, thus good for the whole world.
.co.uk, .us and .io anre cctld, thus country specific.
Segregating TLD makes sense, they are meant to understood what's behind the website.
I think that cctld should be a sub off of the gltd. just take the gltds and append the country extension to them. (so the UK for example would be .com.uk, .org.uk, etc..)
I don't know if it would be wiser (and necessary) to effectively leave the US with the gtld, or to try to transition all of them to a .us sub.
As it sites now, greed and stupidity have now pushed the number of gobal tlds to over a 1000, I would see that 99% of those should be removed, or them all fall back under the rules for the global tld issuance.
If people start using TLDs in a sense that differs from the original intent, are these people necessarily wrong?
I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other. Although, perhaps, I'd be willing to say: who am I to tell others they're wrong?