i think they had free .ml at some point which has become a decent domain because of machine learning
I feel like 99% of .ly sites have nothing to do with libya
In my experience, outside the USA many ccTLDs are commonly used – including the "domain hack" ones, in their own country.
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.
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.
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?
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.
(Most of your list are multinational corporations which is a perfectly reasonable use for .com).
Do you mean .com or the Internet as a whole?
Precisely because .com is used by all the world and his dog. It gives no indication where the organisation presents its home to be.
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 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.