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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

I mean that Google won't show the results and you also won't actually remember the domain, because it's clever. And in this case, it's a spanish domain so is expected to cater to Spain.

It's not unique, the .cat TLD for Catalonia requires that you serve your content in Catalan, so as to prevent people abusing the obvious appeal of a TLD that in English translates to a cute pet.

.io, .ly and .sh have been victims of this technical imperialism.

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Pretty rich to call them victims.

They have benefitted from a large amount of revenue and if they wanted, they could have easily prevented foreign registrations by requiring a mailing address in the country or that the registered site has some tie to the region. Like your example of .cat.

What exactly have these countries lost?

Probably everything, except for .tv (Tuvalu) which do have a good agreement. I'm skipping on .io since it's a rabbithole, but .ly and .sh aren't runned by or on behalf of their governments, they instead are being runned by different companies. The most notorious of these is Niue's (.nu), which their government try their best to recover from a Nordic country to no avail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nu) .

To me, that sounds a lot like a 2 year old type of behavior. Does anybody really even care what a TLD is or is "meant" to be used as? Honestly, if it's not a .com, most people are going to screw up and add .com out of sheer habit.

It's the friggin' internet. If it's out there, someone will do something they feel like doing with it even if that's not the originally intended concept.

> Does anybody really even care what a TLD is or is "meant" to be used as?

Yes, the owners of the TLD. The same way that I cannot register a .google, .no, or .uk at all.

You can register a .no domain through a broker similar to how whois privacy at most registrars works: the broker is the registrant but then affords you full control of the domain.

That sounds like a bad idea. If your site is successful the broker could jack up the price to let you keep control. Better to stick to registering domains directly through a normal registrar. And if you are not in a position to create a Norwegian enkeltpersonsforetak or aksjeselskap, then why bother with a .no domain?

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