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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

A) You get what you pay for.

B) The top-level domains offered here are absolute garbage and are generally seen as problematic. See A.

C) Freenom has a lot of power as the holder of its namespace. Don't like that? Bring it up with ICANN.

Because the Internet is built around a lot of abstractions that only make sense in light of the historical context at the time the technology was originally adopted, it really doesn't lend itself to being friendly to newbies. These people are actively preyed upon by a hostile industry full of shady operators.

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Fwiw, ICANN doesn’t govern ccTLDs, only gTLDs. They try to help advise ccTLDs though: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/cctlds-21-2012-02-25-e...

well, in that case bring it up with the third-world government body that oversees the ccTLD.

I use a .gd domain. I know that if my brothers in Grenada have a government unwilling to play ball, the US will invade them.

In many cases, that body may not exist. Freenom has placed themselves in the role of the registry.

At the invitation of the governments in question. Those governments could withdraw their authorization. They won't, but they could.

You don't get what you pay for. Plenty of high-prized scams around.

Also I have a .gq domain from freenom which works fine and I'm feel I'm getting more than the $0 paid.

... Until you get less.

i think they had free .ml at some point which has become a decent domain because of machine learning

jeez. people should absolutely know better because the ccTLD is for Mali, a somewhat unstable central African country. who cares what the letters alternatively stand for? Any website built on this is already on a shaky foundation.

Is there any domain other than com/edu/gov that’s actually used for its official meaning, and isn’t hosted by a government body?

I feel like 99% of .ly sites have nothing to do with libya

If you live outside of the US, yes quite a lot. That's what cctld's are for, the weird part you are observing is that nobody in the us seems to want to use their cctld.

That's obviously because we view .com as our primary cctld, not .us. The .com tld has been the common commercial domain space for the US since long before the Web existed and long before you could freely register .us domains.

Why would we switch over to primarily utilizing .us given the very early adoption of .com in the culture and economy? It would be nonsensical to do so.

You can see that early adoption well represented here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...

northrop.com 1985, dec.com 1985, att.com 1986, xerox.com 1986, ibm.com 1986, sun.com 1986, intel.com 1986, ti.com 1986, boeing.com 1986, alcoa.com 1986, adobe.com 1986, amd.com 1986, 3com.com 1986, tandy.com 1986, and so on.

I think they mean less private for-profit companies, and more NGOs, little municipal-government projects, and the like. The types of things where it's natural to get your city's or state's official registry to nest your project under their namespace.

In Canada, all our federal-government stuff is under .gov.ca, and all our provincial-government stuff is under .gov.[province].ca. But those .[province].ca domains can also be used by any org located in the province, that asks the province nicely. (Examples: http://www.bccancer.bc.ca/, https://spca.bc.ca/)

This same pattern is, AFAIK, followed by pretty much every other country. .gov.[province/state/region].[country] reserved for the regional governments; .[province/state/region].[country] available upon request to orgs that make sense to be nested there.

I understand that the US uses .gov for its federal-government stuff; but why is e.g. the Legislature of Idaho at https://legislature.idaho.gov/ rather than being at e.g. legislature.gov.id.us ? Why weren't swathes of the .us ccTLD reserved for this use, to mirror what basically every other country does with its ccTLD?

They were; there's a whole complicated set of namespace reservations for government entities under .us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us#Locality_namespace

However, state governments don't have to use this if they don't want to, and they're allowed to have .gov domains. Different states made whatever decisions for whatever idiosyncratic reasons. I strongly suspect that .gov has better name recognition as "this is definitely the government" among the American public, so that might be a reason why state and local government entities might choose to use it.

Until recently, non-federal entities weren't allowed to use .gov. So states and municipalities had to actively switch (and advertise that switch).

To nitpick slightly, most Canadian federal government websites are under .gc.ca, not .gov.ca. For example, pm.gc.ca and travel.gc.ca. But the top-level federal government website is located at Canada.ca (gc.ca actually redirects there).

> Why would we switch over to primarily utilizing .us

Precisely because .com is used by all the world and his dog. It gives no indication where the organisation presents its home to be.

Which is why I check the 'About' page on a site new to me.

As a consumer, why do I care?

The fact that you view an international space as belonging to the US is precisely what's weird and objectionable. Most countries don't do that sort of thing and most intranational companies are happy to use a domain from their own country, except for the US.

(Most of your list are multinational corporations which is a perfectly reasonable use for .com).

Are you familiar with the history of the Internet?

Yes, and as such I'm aware that it was not the Silicon Valley-only project that a certain crowd likes to portray it as. The specific implementation of TCP (and indeed DNS) that ARPANET used came from UC, but it's derived from the French CYCLADES project via the INWG. So it was an international effort from the start, and that's even more true for the complex stacks that today's commercial websites run on.

Those websites running that Swiss originated hypertext protocol? The one that won because the US protocol (gopher) was monetized?

> an international space as belonging to the US

Do you mean .com or the Internet as a whole?

It would probably seem redundant in the USA to use a .us domain, since the default assumption seems to be that everything is US-centric.

Because .com is the defacto US cctld at this point.

It is also widely used for non-USA domains (I put my own there as there is lower risk of .com-wide problems - see recent .org attempted hijacking and .weirdtopextensions are very risky)

It's a interesting fact that .com is also very popular in china. Alexa says 8 of top 10 sites in China use .com. https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/CN

Even the "isn't everything so US-centric!" criticisms are US-centric, it seems.

That is a fun fact!

You can’t anonymously hold a domain in .us.

You can't anonymously hold a domain in any *TLD. Yes, even in freenom's TLDs (you're not a domain holder with free domains)

Only in the US or everywhere? I see there are anonymizing services to mask the domain details so that any whois query returns a pointer to their office rather than the effective domain owners. A service that does the opposite might be handy for example to expose spammers.

Anywhere. Yes, there are "whois guard" services, but that's actually email relays (like aliases). You must provide your identity information (name, surname, other passport/id data, address, etc.) to buy a domain name.

Any "privacy-oriented" registrar just hides that information from whois records, but you still share it to registrar, so in case of government requests or data leak your PII will be exposed.

There is no anonymity in internet, only pseudoanonymity.

I have yet to be asked for a passport and I own a few region locked domains (ex. .EU). That said there are anonymous domain resellers that basically register the domains on themself. It's more expensive than the usual free whois guard but it's not unheard of.

What about njalla?

...except that it's also used by companies from every other country as well. It's more of a slush-bucket "everything goes here" TLD than anything.

I'd guess most ccTLDs are primarily used for the country, only a few get commonly "misused".

/me looks at .io and wonders.

My point. There's 300+ ccTLDs, or 250+ if you only count ASCII ones. There's maybe about a dozen regularly "misused" ones. (.tk is actually the largest ccTLD, but the rest of the top 10 is normal)

Most Brazilian sites use .br and I've not seen a non-Brazilian site use it

Most French-only websites are .fr

Here in Uruguay most of the .uy sites are local businesses.

Only one off the top of my head is ebay. The Canada site is: ebay.ca Really the only place I use regularly that has it...

Alexa also lists amazon.ca, google.ca, canada.ca, kijiji.ca, realtor.ca, (ebay.ca), walmart.ca, cbc.ca, bestbuy.ca, airbnb.ca, homedepot.ca, and several *.gc.ca sites.

In my experience, outside the USA many ccTLDs are commonly used – including the "domain hack" ones, in their own country.

It helps that .ca domains are not available for all. As an individual, you need to be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to purchase one. For companies, they need to have presence in Canada.

Yeah, seriously. Spend any time in Europe. Most local websites are at their ccTLD.

> who cares what the letters alternatively stand for?

Lots of people, in fact the letters don’t even need to stand for anything they just become part of SV tech culture and spread from there. For example look at all the tech companies that utilize .io without any real reason. Or from an eastern perspective .cc (cocoa island) has become popular in China because 1. simplicity and 2. repetition is culturally meaningful.

.io comes from I/O. .ly (Libya) fits as a better example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io

.io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory

The point I was trying to make above ("who cares...") is that you can use any domain you want! You don't need to use a specific ccTLD (.ml would be the example I was referencing) in order to insinuate your machine learning applications.

But I/O is SV culturally derived secondary meaning to .io (British Indian Ocean Territory), there is no reason to have ascribed it. At least with .ly people are incorporating the ly as part of the name like when people register a .in (India) for their cryptocoin project [name]co.in

clearly the success of .ml is only because of marxism-leninism's strive to acquire domains

Mumbles something about collectivists and squatting

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