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Comment by fungiblecog | Hacker News Reader

Who would actually believe a domain name means anything?

If you had no clue about how domains are allocated, why wouldn't you believe it? "These domains are given to group X" sounds totally believable - and is indeed the case for some TLDs?

.com is for domains that fit into a single segment!

About an hour before you:

>... I still have an almost instinctive aversion to all the sites with new TLDs that I come across in search results ...

(Among some other comments, that was just the nearest one.)

So, the likely answer is, "All sorts of people."

If I'm just browsing, I don't really notice them. I have a bunch of domains, and many are .us because it's nice and short with many names available.

Since it's show 'n tell, you can't get a .bank without a bank charter. https, dnssec, tls > 1.2, and dmarc are all mandatory and the registrar does scan everything in your dns zones for violations.

That's all pretty performative given that the largest and most important banking sites on the Internet (1) aren't on .bank and (2) don't use DNSSEC; that this is the case despite those banks operating some of the largest and best-resourced security teams in the industry should tell us something.

As someone who started their career at an F100 and now consults in the SMB space, all it really tells me is that the change is not worth pushing through the bureaucracy and bringing a new mandatory thing to millions of consumers.

At a small town bank, whose risk tolerance is maybe one major loss event per decade? Where a given complaint is never more than 3 people removed from the CEO? Who'se antifraud resources are just normal bankers that also have some extra tasks assigned to them?

Being able to get homoglyph attacks off the risk board at the cost of a few of my billable hours and a week of effort from the marketing person is a no-brainer to them.

I mean, small town banks, sure. And also:

    > $ host -t ds bankofamerica.com                                                                                                               
    bankofamerica.com has no DS record

.edu and .gov mean something.

There are some legacy registrations for .edu that are held by individuals for their own use.

I am unaware of any similar (ab)use of .gov or .mil, however.

And .org never ever meant anything at all.

A well-known glaring exception with .edu is Academia.edu, which is a commercial paper repository/"social network".

Wow, I didn't realise it was this old:

> The URL had been registered back in 1999, before 2001 regulations restricted the “.edu” designation to accredited higher educational institutions. “[D]espite its misleading top level domain,” noted Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2015), head of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, “Academia.edu is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com.” Like other prior domain filings, Academia.edu was grandfathered in, granting the startup a time-sealed patina of nonprofit credibility

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305117696523

That's because the domain name "Academia.edu" was registered in 1999 and the current restrictions on ".edu" TLD were put in place in 2001.

.mil and .gov have always been controlled by the US government,.and since 2013 local governments in the US may register a .gov domain.

Do you navigate to this site by IP address?

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