Not all TLDs are Created Equal | Hacker News Reader

Not all TLDs are Created Equal

hezmatt.org

225 pointspabs3277 comments

As always, these articles seem to be written from a US or "international" point of view that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country.

They are great, absolutely useful, and much lower risk than gTLDs operated by questionable commercial entities. But obviously they depend on the country they represent.

I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country. That would have solved most of these problems that seem to boil down to "when you pick a random country TLD because it looks cute but you don't know much about the country, sometimes you're surprised by that country's policies".

Also, it's not like gTLDs don't have weird policies. A ton of them are a money grab trying to extort money from trademark owners, and they might disappear or raise prices overnight. Com/net/org repeatedly tried shenanigans in the past.

Replacing "do your due diligence" with a heuristic "cc = bad!" is not advisable.

Why did com net org domains try in past, price gouging?

Two events that come to mind:

- The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN, seen as testing the waters for doing the same with .com if the cap removal was successful, which it wasn't

- PIR (operator of .org) was almost sold to some shell company which was gonna transform it into a for-profit from it's current non-profit, this was blocked by ICANN if I remember correctly

Maybe there are more that I don't know about/don't remember

> The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN

I thought those were removed for .org. Did this [1] get reversed?

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/icann-eliminates...

>this was blocked by ICANN if I remember correctly

ICANN executives were in on the play IIRC. They abandoned efforts once regulators started scrutinizing.

It was blocked by the California Attorney General threatening to investigate them. Essentially, historical accident of ICANN being a California-incorporated 501c3 rescued .org from the ICANN board.

Why? Because they can?

yes, lol, he was missing the absolute elephant in the room. if your business operate in france or germany you better have and use the .fr or .de domain, or at least the .eu one. big brands do it (such amazon, google, apple) so do you.

> big brands do it (such amazon, google, apple) so do you.

A few counterpoints:

- https://www.fnac.com/

- https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/

- https://www.apple.com/nl/

Where the web site resides goes in waves; sometimes people diverge it out into multiple sites based on ccTLD, and sometimes they redirect all ccTLDs into one central site with sub-pages. But you can bet they will always be keeping the ccTLD domains registered. I.e. FNAC still owns fnac.nl, Apple still owns apple.nl and IKEA still owns ikea.nl, and if you go there you will be redirected to the correct web page.

>FNAC still owns fnac.nl [...] and if you go there you will be redirected to the correct web page.

That doesn't seem correct

>ping fnac.nl

>Pinging fnac.nl [165.160.15.20] with 32 bytes of data:

>Request timed out.

If you'd tried going to fnac.nl or say use curl for a http request you'd see that it is in fact correct. Ping does not a http request make as they said in the olden days.

I did try going to fnac.nl on my web browser and it does not load. And it still isn't loading for me while fnac.com does.

Edit: it does load after some time on my web browser.

ikea.fr, .de, .nl all exist and redirect to ikea.com subdomains. Same for apple.com

That doesn't necessarily mean the domains are controlled by these entities.

Imagine a sleeper domain squatter.

but still https://www.ikea.nl and https://www.apple.nl

>I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country.

The people of Tuvalu would probably argue against this, since .tv income represents like 12.5% of the national domestic revenue. Taxation is around 15%.

https://finance.gov.tv/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1st-Supple...

You could always just donate some money to Tuvalu and use a better TLD.

It must necessarily be up to the country to decide what "ties to the country" even means anyway. It's important to the Irish Republic for example that everybody with connections to the island of Ireland counts as Irish, even though de facto a corner of their island is occupied by people who (to a lesser or greater extent) insist they're British and are no longer part of the EU unlike the Republic. That's how lots of British people have Irish EU passports, if they were born on the island or have strong connections to it, they're just as entitled to a passport as if they'd been born in Dublin, in the Republic.

It was interesting to see in that budget that Tuvalu earns more from .tv than they do from operating an "Open Registry" (aka "Flag of Convenience") for foreign shipping companies, which is probably the most analogous arrangement to selling domains in your ccTLD from the past.

This is a certainly a nitpick, and pet peeve, but the Irish Republic was a revolutionary state between roughly 1919-1922. The modern state is just known as Ireland, or referred to as the Republic of Ireland.

Fair, too late to correct now.

Northern Ireland is de facto and de jure part of the UK. And "British people with Irish passports" may just as well be written "Irish people with UK connections". It's worth noting that people living in Great Britain often have passports by virtue of being a "foreign birth" since you may be considered Irish just by having an Irish (great-)grandparent.

Finally, as a sibling comment mentions, the state is called "Ireland" and though it is accurately described as the "Irish republic" or similar, that's not part of the official name.

Otherwise you're right and I agree with your point.

Ireland is an unusual case because we grant citizenship based on your connection to the island rather than the country, ie pretty much anyone entitled to British citizenship on the basis of being from Northern Ireland is also entitled to an Irish citizenship.

Specifically you can be entitled to citizenship from birth if either of the following conditions are met:

- at least one parent is an Irish citizen or entitled to be one and was born on the island of Ireland

- you are born anywhere on the island of Ireland (including Northern Ireland) and at least one parent is an Irish or British citizen, a permanent resident of Ireland or Northern Ireland, or has been domiciled on the island of Ireland for 3 of the past 4 years

You're no longer automatically entitled to Irish citizenship via a grandparent born in Ireland if your Irish parent was born overseas unless the parent's birth was registered with an Irish diplomatic mission.

> "British people with Irish passports" may just as well be written "Irish people with UK connections".

We normally characterise people by how they self-describe. These people would describe themselves as British, but they have Irish passports, often because these are EU passports and thus convenient whereas post-Brexit the British passport incurs border checks at neighbouring countries, because "Cut off your nose to spite your face" isn't just an English saying it's also apparently Tory policy.

What happens when Tuvalu is uninhabitable due to rising sea level? If .tv continues to exist, does that money go to the Tuvaluan diaspora?

> doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country.

This is a very odd interpretation of an article which is essentially saying "don't buy ccTLDs unless you live there".

That aspect is only talked about at the very end almost as an aside, and the phrasing is "[some ccTLDs are] more likely to be ok [than other ccTLDs]", "it might be somewhat safer" and "gTLDs are at least lower risk than ccTLDs".

This certainly suggests a different conclusion than "don't buy ccTLDs unless you live there".

I would say the conclusion of this article is actually "don't buy ccTLDs except maybe in some cases that I won't even discuss since they seem so rare to me". I would say on the other hand that buying a domain with the ccTLD of the country you're operating in is a must, and especially so if you're operating in a few neighbouring countries.

> This certainly suggests a different conclusion than "don't buy ccTLDs unless you live there".

From the article's conclusion:

> Are ccTLDs Ever Useful?

> I certainly don’t think it’s a good idea to register a domain under a ccTLD for “vanity” purposes: because it makes a word, is the same as a file extension you like, or because it looks cool.

> Finally, it might be somewhat safer to register under a ccTLD if you live in the location involved. At least then you might have a better idea of whether your domain is likely to get pulled out from underneath you. Unfortunately, as the .eu example shows, living somewhere today is no guarantee you’ll still be living there tomorrow, even if you don’t move house.

He makes the fair point that, even if they are intended for residents, it may not always be safe for them either.

Taking one example, a price hike from $25 -> $75/yr affects everyone, including residents.

Some of the more fashionable CCTLDs have discounts for actual local businesses/individuals.

>That aspect is only talked about at the very end almost as an aside

It's talked about at the end because that's usually where the conclusion goes. Everything talked about before that is providing evidence for said conclusion.

What an odd interpretation. To me it reads as the entire point of the article.

In this context is “odd interpretation” similar in meaning to a passive aggressive form of RTFM?

> they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country

That would have just opened the door to proxy-ownership. You register a domain under a company and they let you use it.

Which is absolutely something that happens with ccTLDs that impose that kind of policy today.

That proxy ownership takes significantly more time and money than the domain itself. I think it would prevent "queer.af" situations quite well.

.af is so beautiful for vanity domains but only someone with a complete and total ignorance of multiple subjects would register one for serious use. Yeah, at least requiring a proxy you might have someone with enough knowledge to point out the mistake there.

Seems more like a statement than a mistake.

In the case of queer.af (as noted in TFA) they registered the domain in 2018 when the government was significantly different, and, recognizing the political situation, were working on moving to a different one.

Was the former government empathetic to that? I wouldn't have thought so. I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows about it.

On the one hand perhaps yes because they did not lose their registration under that government. Also for good or ill that government was under some amount of influence from the United States which, while not perfect, could be seen as offering some amount of influence or protection. On the other hand, it was probably more the case that, in the absence of the Taliban, the people creating the site simply did not have the same concerns as they later would.

What about the early 2000s adoption of .ly (Libya)?

Not really. There already are some ccTLDs that do require a local nexus, and the registrars just incorporate trustee services into the domain registration. There's a bit of a price premium, but nothing major, and the time impact usually amounts to filling out one extra form when purchasing a domain.

In that case the raised price will still impact the likelihood of someone unaware of the ccTLD specifics getting their domains registered in countries they've never even heard of.

“Significantly more time and money” just means bigger companies will have more of a monopoly on those domains, which is also not good.

I don't think I've ever noticed a problem with this. The only difference I can find is that the "buy this domain for $4000" scammers have a different default language.

Yup. .NO has restrictions on their domain names. And that happens with them. Just ends up with less transparency and more costs (that doesn't go to internet infrastructure but lawyers etc).

It may happen with them, but it's much more rare than with .ly and .io and .ai. I can't recall ever seeing a .no.

> I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country.

That's already the case for plenty of ccTLDs. .eu, .it., .bg and I'm sure many others are only available to citizens or legal entities registered in that country.

> that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country.

What something is intended for in some hypothetical, ideal setting, is a moot point given that the countries have full control over their ccTLD.

That's the issue, and the author identifies it correctly.

Well, they're NOT vanity domains. They were created specifically for countries, to be owned by countries and controlled by countries. The fact that it happens to look neat to use that domain doesn't change that fact. When you start using such a domain, you should know full well that you are tying yourself to a resource that you could lose at any time, for any reason. Tying the health of your business to such a condition seems crazy to me.

They said domain under a ccTLD, so they're clearly not talking about ccTLDs themselves as vanity domains.

I was talking about the domains under ccTLDs. The domains <something>.<country code> aren't "vanity domains", they're for a country to control. The country may rent them out to be used as a vanity domain, but the country has absolute and total control over them. So using them as a vanity domain that your business relies on is a gamble.

> ...that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country.

The author appears to understand that perfectly well:

> Those ccTLDs that clearly represent and are associated with a particular country are more likely to be OK... > Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality...

Then they should have added "US" here in the first few paragraphs: "Generic TLDs are what most [US] organisations and individuals register their domains under:"

I fail to see how that is helpful. Is the statement untrue without the [US] annotation? The author explicitly mentions that a user is the best judge of their country when deciding on whether to use that country's ccTLD. That's pretty implicit to me that the author is considering a larger audience than the US.

Yes. Growing up in a non-US country, almost every website I interacted with or was advertised was the TLD of my home country. It was incredibly rare to see global TLDs. It usually implied it was a multi-national company, and even those often registered an additional domain locally because people are more familiar with it. I would guess this is the same for most countries except the US, which makes that statement untrue.

Yup. A mistake of the Internet that’ll surely never be corrected for at least the next 50 years at least, is rhe US not using a ccTLD like everyone else. Not being able to differentiate between a US and ‘global’ presence based on domain name is a tad annoying. The taxonomy is immensely useful.

And please for the love of God nobody here lecture me about the history of the Internet. I know why it is the way it is. But it’s a frustrating legacy quirk. Anyone that sees it as anything else is just buying into the “the US is the universe’s ‘main country’” BS.

One annoying quirk of the .us cctld is that those administrators don't allow whois privacy like most gtlds do. So as soon as you register one, the phone number you associate with it gets destroyed by marketing solicitations.

So in addition to being a "frustrating legacy quirk", the administration of the cctld makes it more appealing to use a global tld whenever possible. That is not me buying into the BS you cite... it's just learned experience based on my dealings with those TLD aministrators.

(Source: I own multiple .us domains, and it's a headache for the reasons I described above.)

> I would guess this is the same for most countries except the US, which makes that statement untrue

Only if there are more organizations using ccTLDs outside of the US than organizations using generic domains within it.

https://domainnamestat.com/statistics/tldtype/all indicates that strictly based on domain registration counts, ccTLDs are around 39% of total domain registrations. So not nothing, but also not a majority.

> Only if there are more organizations using ccTLDs outside of the US than organizations using generic domains within it.

"Is the US larger than the world outside it?"

> ccTLDs are around 39% of total domain registrations.

My guess would be that generic domains have more unused registrations, squatting, and redirects to ccTLDs.

This is backwards. ccTLDs are much higher risk than gTLDs operated by commercial entities because those entities are governed by ICANN which has pricing requirements and a plan in place to transfer them if the entity goes under.

The whole TLD system is kind of broken and has been for decades, ever since companies starting buying the .net and .org versions of their domain names to go along with the (then) all-important .com. The TLDs were originally designed as a taxonomy of organization types. There was a fair bit of discussion about dropping TLDs altogether after the internet went mainstream and .com domain names became much scarcer, but there never seemed to be enough agreement to make it happen.

It's interesting to think about how much of the old internet and its protocols were built around the assumption that internet-capable computers and (especially) networks were owned and tightly-administered by institutions, not individuals.

If I had my druthers, top level domains would exclusively be for sovereign legal jurisdictions. (And maybe EU or UN.)

That way it would at least match all the indirect rules imposed by those jurisdictions, such as treaties over conflicting trademarks, and it would be clear which courts should get involved in any lawsuits or appeals, etc.

It's kind of a Conway's Law thing: The system will suck the least when the code-organization is aligned to the group-entities.

P.S.: Sure, if you launched a new global company you'd want to register lots of different domains, but that's already true anyway.

> they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country

And lose the revenue? Caveat emptor.

> To register (and maintain) a domain name ending in .eu, you have to be a resident of the EU.

Tiny nit (and I only bring it up because it is relevant to me), but you can also own a .eu domain if you are a citizen of the EU (or EEA), wherever you are resident.

This rule may have been brought in as a result of Brexit, as the Europa website says:

> Previously restricted to residents of EU/EEA countries, any EU citizen can now register a .eu domain name wherever they are in the world.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-domain-name...

The point still stand, of course. It was (and remains) a headache for a lot of people. I still haven't told my registrar I no longer live in the EU because although I am (as an EU citizen) legally entitled to my .eu domain, I don't trust them to understand that.

Some EU countries also have the same policy for their ccTLDs, although I believe the EU rules are that they aren't allowed to restrict to just their own country's citizens/residents like others worldwide do, they can only restrict non-EU registration.

Caused me some grief post-Brexit when my firstname.tld domain happened to be some French islands and AFNIC started indicating they'd enforce it. Fortunately I have the .uk now.

It wouldn't make any sense to require a specific EU country. The EU's Freedom of Movement rules mean that on the whole all of any EU member state's citizens are welcome to go wherever they please within the EU, so you can't require "citizenship" or "residence" of a specific country.

The way this comes about is interesting. First up the EC (the predecessor entity to the EU) is a trade bloc, so it wants to ensure you can move say money and goods around, not much use being a trading bloc if it's there's a lot of taxes and paperwork to move your partly finished Doodads from Germany to France, then when they're finished ship them to Italy for sale. But wait, if we can only move money and goods we create a race to the bottom, the workers would be trapped, so move production to wherever the most desperate workers are and pay them as little as possible. That doesn't sound like we've made anything better. So they say workers can move too, if you want to live somewhere with better pay, or a nicer climate, that's cool. And then the EU's court says well, what exactly is a worker? Is Bob a worker if he just moved to your country hoping to find a job? Does he get to bring his elderly grandmother? She's not going to get a job, how is she a worker? So they decide no, not just workers, all people. All EU people are welcome to move anywhere inside the EU.

> All EU people are welcome to move anywhere inside the EU.

this is not true, it is still "freedom of movement (for workers)"

the granny example is explicitly not permitted unless they have sufficient funds to support themselves without the target states' assistance (meaning independently wealthy)

you can be deported otherwise

If you move somewhere to work at age 62 and then retire at 65, can you stay there? Do you have to become a citizen first?

(Just curious; I know this is a tangent!)

Presumably you would have built up a pension in your previous country, which you can draw from. That would satisfy the requirement for an independent source of income. When Britain was in the EU it was (and still is) common for pensioners to live in Spain.

You gain the right to permanent residence after 5 years of residence under the other conditions.

The 65 year old would need to live from their pension for a couple more years.

The comment you're responding to is wrong. Yes of course you can stay there, you can even move there post-retirement. You just can't get the very lowest level of benefits unless you've lived there for long enough.

> the granny example is explicitly not permitted

This is totally wrong.

The granny can get her pension anywhere in the EU, no "independent wealth" required.

There are some restrictions if you have no means to support yourself and require benefits, but the restrictions are definitely not as broad as "granny needs much money on her bank account"

Read: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju... and links contained therein

not all grannies are of pensionable age

your linked page alludes to this, without details

> In order to stay in another EU country for more than three months, EU citizens have to meet certain conditions depending on their status (for example worker, self-employed, student, etc.) and may be asked to comply with administrative formalities.

if you follow the wizard on your page you get this:

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/residence-ri...

My registrar only requires that I have an EU mailing address, so for the handful of EU domains I maintain I have an astonishingly cheap PO box in Spain (I live in the US). Presumably, there's a trash can somewhere outside Barcelona that has a bunch of snailmail domain spam addressed to me.

Your registrar only verifies that you have an EU mailing address. You can absolutely lose your domains if they for some reason audit you and decide you are in breach if their terms

This is extremely unlikely - I wouldn't lose sleep over this. This will only happen when you're doing something controversial/illegal and your registrar is actively trying to legally get rid of you.

>This is extremely unlikely - I wouldn't lose sleep over this. This will only happen when you're doing something controversial/illegal and your registrar is actively trying to legally get rid of you.

But per the subject of the article I think it's worth taking very seriously from multiple angles. Domains are something a lot of people care about for a very long time, their entire lives, or the case of a business its whole existence as an entity. My oldest core domains hit their 25th anniversary this year. A lot can happen over the course of decades, including vast changes in what counts as "controversial/illegal". The winds of politics can and have shifted, repeatedly, a great deal, and technological advance has for better and very much for worse reduced a lot of gray area and informal aspects of law/culture that people depended on (though boosting others).

If one is counting on "audits are very expensive and thus receive significant political push back" it's worth reflecting on whether another 25 years of AI and a host of developments might change that. Could the subject of EU domain ownership at any point become a hot topic? Are there possible financial/social incentives that might push someone to make it a hot topic (absolutely!)? Etc etc, but I think part of the point of the article and certainly something I've come to consider more myself is it's worth taking a longer view more often when considering foundational stuff.

About this, it didn't get traction but yesterday I submitted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356410

The terms and conditions of .ai domain names include things such as "not asking for investors" (without an Anguilla license to be a bank, broker, public company, ICO, exchange, or gambling site) and "not violating copyrights", both of which are… complicated for a lot of AI-related startups that chose to use a .ai domain.

This is the much more interesting news / fact, people relying on a weak .ai TLD for their billion dollar idea.

Most billion dollar ideas are worth about 2 cents aren't they?

The idea is worth 2 cents.

The successful execution could be worth $2b.

They clearly tie "not asking for investors" to "don't be a scam", so I don't think any legitimate AI startup has a concern on that front. Most startups aren't exactly pitching for investment on their home page anyway.

My local ccTLD answers to the democratic government on which I vote. ICANN is a foreign entity and answers to the US government.

My TLD answering to the democratic government on which I have 1 of 10 million votes - and most of it not going the way I'd like - is my worst fear.

Still, if that's your worst fear, at least you must have a pretty good government.

No, it's just the only thing left where they can touch me.

Better it answers to a board of directors where you have 0 votes?

Yes, that board of directors is motivated to keep their revenue stream. A state doesn't care, it can just steal more (not saying all taxes are stealing, but it is in my home country).

...especially if 9.9 million of those votes are being cast by people on the basis of questions completely unrelated to TLD governance, and who may not even be aware that such a thing exists.

I've never understood the model of having a single democratic process be the arbiter of every issue. It just allows gamesmanship where factions can play up issue X to win votes, then use the political power they obtain to push their agenda on completely unrelated issue Y. I suspect this is a major motivation for a lot of the exaggerated political polarization around symbolic "culture war" issues.

In a functioning democracy, the government does indeed represent the people. Not every country is lucky enough to have a functioning democracy of course, and the people only gets to vote once every few years for a president that by design does not represent them.

I trust the ccTLD of my country more than the gTLDs that are private entities.

>In a functioning democracy, the government does indeed represent the people.

I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people", because that concept represents an aggregation of many distinct individuals and communities, and all controversies and conflicts of interests that are addressed via politics emerge from within that aggregation.

Politics is a tool for mitigating disputes arising from divergences of values or conflicts of interests within "the people", so the idea of treating it as something that expresses a singular set of values or interests applicable to the whole is incorrect.

> I trust the ccTLD of my country more than the gTLDs that are private entities.

The point is that everything is a private entity, even the government-run ones. All institutions are groups of specific people inhabiting a bounded context, and there's no mechanism for effectively making any particular institution accountable to a speculative aggregation of millions, so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless.

We seem to be living in pretty different countries :-).

> so the distinction of between "public" and "private" is largely meaningless

In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people. There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless.

> I don't even consider it logically possible for a singular government advancing a singular policy to represent "the people"

Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand.

The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country. So you, individually, are not represented by the government, but most of the citizen are.

That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible. But if you believe that, you need to learn how to compromise, for your own sake.

> In my country, what's "public" is owned by the government, and the government is elected by the people.

All formalities. The government is just a specific institution within society, and all of the symbolic rituals by which it appears to be acting on behalf of "the people" are illusions.

> There is an obvious difference between what is public and what is private, to the point where it is actually hard for me to imagine that someone living in my country may believe that the distinction is meaningless.

There is no obvious difference. It takes a heavy stack of conditioned assumptions to make the distinction in the first place, where a hypothetical space alien observing our planet would just see groups of humans acting in bounded contexts.

> Imagine that the people elects the government. Not one president, but the whole government. You will end up with elected officials ranging from the left to the right. If more people vote for the right, then there are more officials on the right, but there are still others that are elected on the left/center. For important matters, you have a referendum, where the people can directly vote on the topic at hand.

"Left" and "right" are just about as arbitrary as distinctions as "public" and "private" are.

There's no way to make any specific office-holder, let alone all of them, accountable to a vast aggregation of disparate individuals, each in equal measure, when the divergences in values and conflicts of interest among that set of individuals is where all of the controversies that those offices exist to mitigate come from in the first place.

> The result of that is that if you always disagree with everything the government does, it means that you are part of a pretty small minority in your country.

I don't always disagree with everything that the government does at the object level. It's just that I recognize that the cost of the government doing the things that I do like is (a) doing lots of stuff I don't like in parallel, (b) doing things that are harmful to others for my benefit, both of which I dislike.

That's why I prefer to have a plurality of solutions maintained by the wide range of communities and institutions that aren't the government, catering to all values and interests in parallel, without usually having to make the compromises inherent in centralization.

> That's the whole point. If you believe that everyone should have a government with which they agree 100% of the time, then that's not possible.

I think that most people should be going about their affairs in most matters without any direction from the government in the first place, so there should be little for them to agree or disagree with at all. For the few issues that do involve the whole of society, cannot be meaningfully disaggregated, and for which only a single approach is possible, then your comments regarding compromise are applicable.

> where a hypothetical space alien observing our planet would just see groups of humans acting in bounded contexts.

Well, if you take it like that, then of course we are all animals, we don't need laws, and we will all die eventually so what's the point? But that's an easy and uninteresting take.

I get it, you're a libertarian, you don't want a government to "dictate" what you should or should not do. Now my answer to that would be that some people have different opinions and believe that having a government that defines what the people can and cannot do is the fair way. There are things that I definitely don't want you to be able to do even if it I don't even know that you are doing them.

And there are countries that have a functioning democratic process that most of the people is happy about. And in those countries, relying on the ccTLD makes sense.

> Well, if you take it like that, then of course we are all animals, we don't need laws, and we will all die eventually so what's the point? But that's an easy and uninteresting take.

It's not a question of needing laws -- it's that laws are either emergent from the incentives inherent in a given social context, or they aren't really laws at all.

The idea of law as a product of legislation, i.e. some specific organization formulating prescriptive rules in the abstract and then using the threat of force to coerce people into compliance, is almost a contradiction in terms, inasmuch as the strongest faction using force to make others comply with their demands is what you already have in a raw state of nature without having to formalize any concept of law to begin with.

> I get it, you're a libertarian, you don't want a government to "dictate" what you should or should not do.

No, it's a bit beyond that. It's that I don't really recognize the concept of "government" in the way you're using it as anything that really exists. Everything is just specific people acting on the motivations they already have within bounded contexts.

What you call "government" is really just a specific group of people, like any other, differentiated only by their use of symbolic woo-woo to override their own reservations about violating moral norms that everyone else generally adheres to.

> Now my answer to that would be that some people have different opinions and believe that having a government that defines what the people can and cannot do is the fair way

The problem is that government can't define what other people can and cannot do. They have no control over what inherent abilities or capacities others have. All they can do is threaten people with reprisals for ignoring their dictates, and many people routinely call their bluff and do what they want anyway.

And since the thing that restrains people from transgressing against each other is primarily the incentives inherent to human social relations, not the threat of reprisal from third parties who aren't present, it stands to reason that much of what "government" actively intervenes to enforce are rules that it is imposing onto society, but which society itself does not consent to.

> And there are countries that have a functioning democratic process that most of the people is happy about. And in those countries, relying on the ccTLD makes sense.

And, again, most of that "democratic process" is defined by people who have no idea what ccTLDs are and have no opinions on the matter, where the NIC is a de facto "private" organization in the first place.

Good for you. Can't say the same for many of the exotic ccTLDs that are considered sexy these days.

On the other hand, there are oddities like .eu that have too many layers of abstraction between the people and the actual administrators; zombie ccTLDs like .su and .yu which stand for countries that no longer exist; and phantom ccTLDs like .io which don't stand for any officially recognized country at all. So it really depends on which ccTLD you're talking about.

> So it really depends on which ccTLD you're talking about.

Indeed. ccTLD vanity domains are a bad idea in general, and using .af for such purposes is an extraordinarily bad idea. As another comment pointed out, the article's conclusion of "avoid all ccTLDs" rather than "do your due diligence" is weird.

Agreed. I would generally not use a ccTLD unless 1) it's from a stable first-world democracy, and 2) I have either citizenship or a strong business presence in that country.

Having said that, if OP is from the United States, I can sort of understand why the conclusion goes "avoid all ccTLDs." Americans have a tendency to treat the initial set of gTLDs as their own -- not only .gov, .mil, and .edu, but all the well-known ones, too.

I would add, if it is the place where your business is located (or you live).

Regardless of how good or bad a government it is, you are already subject to its jurisdiction.

Depends on how permanent you think your current location is.

Someone living and doing business in Canada might be eligible for .ca right now, but what if they decide to immigrate to the United States, and do business in the Bay Area instead? That's a fairly common situation for startup founders, but things can get really hairy unless they are a full Canadian citizen.

Iirc .io is not _a_ country but a territory of another country (British Indian ocean territory).

A similar case is for American Samoa (.as), Guam (.gu). Etc.

Although it is technically correct to say they are not "internationally recognized countries", that's because they are not countries, not because they are not internationally recognized (they very much are). Thus the qualifier is confusing.

It is like if I claimed that my cat is not an "dog from this planet". That statement is true not because my cat comes from another planet, but simply because it's not a dog in the first place.

The difference between the British Indian Ocean Territory and say, American Samoa is that, as far as the BIOT government is concerned, there is no permanent population there. Obviously the US military base can just use .mil. So if ccTLDs are limited to locals, nobody is entitled to .io at all.

The Chagossians do exist, and I'm not trying to diminish their claims. But my understanding is that they claim the islands as a part of Mauritius, which also has its own domain name (.mu), and wouldn't identify with the colonial BIOT government that expelled them in any case.

Yeah, the timeless misalignment between what ought to be and what technically is

It's still a territory with some governance and so on.

https://www.biot.gov.io/ is a genuine use.

https://www.sure.io/ is another (an ISP).

Is the the Chagossians who claim the islands as mart of Mauritius or the Mauritians?

There are also a number of other territories that are not countries that have ccTLDs: .re, .gs, .mq, .fk etc.

That's the whole point - don't treat "ccTLDs" as a single category, and the diference there shouldn't be between "exotic ccTLDs" and "common ccTLDs" but rather "your ccTLD" and "foreign ccTLDs".

If you are in Afghanistan and run your business in Afghanistan in a legitimate way, intending to comply with Afghanistan laws, then there's no issue at all in using an .af TLD.

And conversely, you should treat e.g. .uk and .fr as "exotic" if you're not in there and don't intend to spend the time and effort to learn about what is permitted there and not, it would make all sense for you to get kicked off of these domains by doing something that's obviously legal where you live.

ccTLDs are issued by IANA which is literally setup by the US government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Au...

Meanwhile ICANN is an international company so it doesn't answer to any government except within their respective borders.

The US Government ended its involvement in IANA when it moved to an international oversight model in 2016. IANA is operated by Public Technical Identifiers which is an affiliate of ICANN, and ICANN provides all of its funding. Governments have a say in how ICANN operates through its Government Advisory Committee, at which all governments — including the US — have a seat.

Great clarification. What I'm poking at is that in all likelihood the US will hold the same view towards a gTLD as a ccTLD and for the same reasons. It is in line with Western ideals to preserve free speech, and so governments of Western societies must appeal to those ideals. The US is no exception, as seen by its willingness to be hands off with regards to IANA and ICANN.

The abstraction layer the internet is implementing on top of geography is proving increasingly leaky these days.

I think the irony in this incident is that it might actually strengthen the original purpose of ccTLDs, as namespaces for domains within a particular country. Because it shows that, no matter what your domain vendor or even the country's registrar tells you the domain is ultimately controlled by the country's government and is therefore subject to the whims and fate of that country.

The concept of the domain on today's internet is a bit anachronistic on the internet these days. People just want to get "places" on the internet, not to addresses.

What is the alternative? IP addresses? AOL Keywords? Abstracting away the whole thing and forcing people to only connect to your webserver via a mobile app?

Domains are still the best thing anyone has managed to come up with. We just need better administration of them since ICANN sold out.

most people with a laptop/desktop will type "facebook" into the address bar of their browser, which will do a search in whatever search engine was provided as the default, then click on the first link

they have little to no conception of what a TLD is

actually, most people use an app on their phone for everything and avoid the web browser

I don't say this to insult the average person, this is simply what I see non-engineers do

https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html

SEO, unfortunately.

As Palomides mentioned, most people just search for a website they will go to instead of typing in whatever cute domain you've crafted.

Sorry, but that reads a lot like "not invented here".

You do realize that domains were invented so people could get to "places" instead of addresses, right?

So pray tell, what would you replace domains with? And what advantage would your schema have over what exists now?

Because, the addresses don't go away. Underneath whatever you come up with, will always be an IP address, and has to be, because you need a way to route packets.

So whatever you want to replace domains with, has o solve the exact same problem: Wrap IP addresses in a nice, human friendly, hierarchically organized schema, that is easy to read, remember and type.

Hierarchically organized is not a hard requirement. A domain could consist of nothing more than a unique Unicode string with no '/' or ' ' in it. It might do well to require a '.' be present, but even that isn't necessary.

I'm quite content with what we have, however. A "unique string domain" regime has to pick between an anarchic landscape of independent registrars playing whack-a-mole with sniping and squatting, or a single central source of truth, neither of those strikes me as ideal. I don't think routing would actually be an issue though, given the power of today's servers and good algorithms for hashmaps in the many millions of keys.

> Hierarchically organized is not a hard requirement

Technically correct, but in practical use, it is absolutely a requirement. Entities within domains are usually hierarchically organized, this already starts at the top level by having www.domain, mail.domain, dns.domain, file.domain, ...

So if we implemented a scheme without built-in hierarchy, I can 100% guarantee that one of the first things admins will do, is implement their own hierarchy naming conventions on top of it, just to keep things organized. The difference then is, that we won't have one clear way to do that, but hundreds of different ones.

> I don't think routing would actually be an issue though, given the power of today's servers

Anything that relies on "worse solution offset by throwing more compute at it", is an instant "denied" in my book. That's how we ended up with electron apps.

You're greatly overstating the performance requirements here, DNS could just hash the string and farm out to 256 subservers running subsidiary hashmaps to the associated IP address. The multi-level schema is absolutely not a performance requirement, comparing this to Electron is silly, it is in fact much simpler than the DNS we have, with comparable demands in terms of memory and compute.

We agree about the utility of heirarchy in domains on a social and administrative level, though.

> You're greatly overstating the performance requirements here

No I'm really not, I am simply saying that doing something in a way that requires way more compute for the same result, without ANY tangible advantage over the existing system, is a bad solution.

It doesn't matter if its doable.

I don't think it is common to use `.us` in the US, but many other countries use their ccTLD a lot more. I personally don't like it when companies hack them (typically with `.io` or `.ai`), because I am used to assign a meaning to the ccTLDs.

My point being that while it may feel anachronistic in the US these days, think that there are many countries that are not the US :-).

My ccTLD gives me much more confidence than some random company that rents TLDs governed by who knows. It's provided by my ISP which is owned by the state, which serves the population.

> which is owned by the state, which serves the population

Until it doesn't. Corruption and coups are a thing.

Then what?

I know DNS has a terrible centralized design, but what is the alternative?

Good for you, but...

a) that's not the case in many places, as demonstrated by what happened in Afghanistan, where control over the ccTLD now lies with a group of religious extremists

b) you have no guarantee that the happy state of affairs with your ccTLD will continue. Governments change, and so do politics.

Sure but all of this is true for gTLDs, with a different set of caveats.

Corporations don't exist in a vacuum, they're subject to the laws of the jurisdictions they're incorporated in. Corporations aren't permanent and unchanging, they can pivot in unexpected ways or enact arbitrary decisions that may affect you.

Most people just get to pretend gTLDs are safe from politics because most gTLDs are ultimately under US jurisidiction and even outside the US we often treat that as the default. The mistake of the people using dot-af domains was to treat af as if this is also true for them - which even prior to the US retreat wasn't a safe bet.

What's also missing from the discourse around `queer.af` is that they were merely one domain of many affected because the Taliban withdrew from Gandi (among others?), not just the people running that Mastodon instance. It's just the most obvious example because of the nature of social media.

If you happen to live in a state that serves its population that is

Obviously. I think we just have to accept that some people trust their government, and some people don't. There is no rule there: use the one you trust (and preferably use the ccTLD only if you have something to do with that country, because that's the whole point).

Abusing ccTLDs for things which are not relevant to the particular country just because they TLD sounds or reads cool is where the problem began. .cc, .rs, just to name some.

I know it has become out of fashion these days, but countries have sovereignty. If the registrar thinks they want to decline a particular subdomain, thats their call. And all international activists can go to hell.

".to" was the first big one I remember from the late 90s. You could get a forwarded address to your geocities or angelfire URL from something like "welcome.to/myawesomesite" or "jump.to/mycoolpage"

Disappointed to see no mention yet of Tuvalu, the tiny low-lying island nation (imperiled by global warming etc) where something like 10% of the government income is funded by sales of .tv domains, which is just such an interesting case.

Related recent piece of this discussion:

Queer.af Mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348923

And one about the flipside/money side of things that was omitted from the OP:

.ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477

I remember .ly domains, at the time widely used as url shorteners, having troubles in times of political unrest.

In a few days my domain `foodba.by` is expiring after I stopped transferring funds to Belarus after the role the country took during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Glad that side project never took of :-)

> Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality, such as when auDA decided to declare an open season in the .au namespace some years ago.

I think this is referring to these licensing rules changes effective April 2021:

https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/policies-and-complia...

The article goes on about how this is “bigotry” by the Afghan authorities for suspending queer.af yet doesn’t bother to consider whether any other domains were affected. Saw at least one other report yesterday and I suspect it’s not the only one:

https://x.com/wesbos/status/1757418308050079762

One other thing I'd note is to avoid using the new gTLDs like .email or .mail for an email address. I tried it and discovered just how many bad form validators and spam filters there are out there.

What year did you experiment with that? I know of one person currently using .email TLD and hasn't reported issues.

I started using .guru not long after it launched and definitely experienced the issues you describe, including my residential ISP not being able to resolve.

I switched away from it in 2021. Certainly most websites handled it fine, and most of my email went through. But in both cases, there were notable exceptions compared to using a .com domain.

Actually, ccTLD might be a VERY GOOD thing: if I buy something from a ".com" website, it can be from anywhere in the world... and I would have no recourse in case of scam.

On the other side: if I buy something from my own country, I know that the law will protect me because the TLD tell me that the vendor has at least a company in my country, subject to my country laws

Relying on a site's TLD to verify a company's location is rarely (never?) a good idea.

What exactly is stopping me from registering a company at a PO box, creating myfakeshop.yourcountry, taking your money, and disappearing?

I remember in the late 90s there were at least a couple companies promoting alternative TLDs outside the standard set. I have no idea how that was implemented. Just special DNS servers with extra TLDs? Or something more involved on the OS levels?

Seems like there could be an appetite for such a thing these days. TLDs outside ICANNs control.

It was an alternative DNS but I forgot which it was.

You had to switch to these DNS servers, which the added "benefit" that DNS queries returning NXDOMAIN were hijacked to show you ads.

I don't think this has any usefulness anymore, since gTLDs exist.

gTLDs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can run your own DNS servers for waaay less.

I think the usefulness could come from community controlled TLDs. Might not be a mainstream thing but free libre TLDs for open source projects and what not?

Something similar to what Let's Encrypt did to the SSL Certificate market. Before they came along, SSL root certificate were way over priced and overnight, the market simply disappeared.

The same should happen to gTLDs.

IIRC, the cost is ~$200k one time and ~$25/yr. Shitcoins get magnitudes higher crowd funding. Not impossible to do at all.

On a technical level, this is very simple - just change the list of DNS root servers on all "participating" machines to point to your own new nameservers.

But then you have the problem: Who manages your community controlled domains? Who keeps track of who owns which domain?

OpenNIC is a project that replaces and extends the official DNS root maintained by Verisign.

http://opennic.org

Are there any notable websites actually on that infrastructure?

The ‘Project Showcase’ only shows a single example.

No. It's an old hobby project which has nearly fizzled out; the web site hasn't been updated in years.

Alternate roots are on thin ice in general nowadays, especially as there's no reasonable way to safely issue TLS certificates for domains which aren't under the ICANN root. (Running your own CA introduces a lot of messy trust issues and is inadvisable.)

Maybe if we switched from the current state of PKI with CAs to DNSSEC and DANE/TLSA, it would be easier.

But doing that would mean to either trust the current resolver you are using, which is unacceptable, as it's sometimes cloudflare or google, or running your own resolver on every device -- which also does not work. It is absolutely crucial for the DNS system we have today that there's a small number of resolvers that have large caches, otherwise root servers would blow up. Unless we massively start implementing some novel RFCs.

I can't think of one instance where ICANN has told a TLD to remove a domain at the second level. Maybe it happened in the past, but I'm drawing a blank.

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

I think the common one was "new.net" and yes, it was just some kind of software extension that either added to or replaced your DNS queries. If you didn't have the software installed, you could still get to, say example.faketld by going to example.faketld.new.net

I remember them pushing to get ISPs to use their custom DNS, and I think there was least one major ISP that implemented it natively.

There are obvious examples of tlds outside of ICANN control:

* OpenNIC domains * .onion, .i2p and other alternative networks * .bit, .eth and other cryptocurrency backed domains

Presstv.com is a domain siezed by US government that belongs to a foreign news agency (based out of iran)

This means that the .com TLD is at the whims of US govt, just like .AF is at the whims of afghan govt.

If you are at the mercy of US govt for .com you should be at the mercy of afghan govt as well for their cctld.

What's the problem here?

Imagine if one day we come up with a technology that allows resolving _arbitrary strings_ and doesn't cost multiple times the cost of the hosting structure itself.

We have that technology already, it's called DNS. Everything else is people/organization problems, that won't be solved by adding more technology to the fire.

> While ICANN kinda-sorta has something to do with ccTLDs (in the sense that it makes them exist on the Internet), it has no authority to control how a ccTLD is managed.

Right, like ICANN's .com and other traditional domains are managed fairly and can be trusted :)

Isn't it .com domains that are generally easily taken hostage by cybersquatters because of dubious rules and lowest cost possible administration?

I think we should petition ICANN for a .asfuck TLD, so the queer.af people have somewhere to go to that's less politically fraught.

Never forget a resident of Christmas Island was able to bring down the most infamous .cx domain with a single complaint.

> I don’t think any gTLD operator will be invading a neighbouring country any time soon.

I would guess people in Yemen (most recently) would find this statement somewhat funny.

Also, isn't .ru still a thing? (As is .us, for that matter.)

I get the impression that .com is safer than .bananas or whatever. Is this true? I would settle for a not so good .com for the safety.

.com is run by Verizon, and .bananas will be by another for-profit company (most likely Donuts).

If the .com prices were to be increased, there will be a huge backlash. As for .bananas, not so much.

.bananas might get blocked at TLD level, .com unlikely so.

Verisign administers .com and .net domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign

I imagine it was an auto-correct typo.

Never knew about Reston, interesting little city.

There is an agreement for .com and .org (and formerly .net, but not anymore) that registry price increases are capped at 10% a year, and they aren't allowed designate in demand domains as more expensive premium domains. There was an attempt by the .org operators to renegotiate that, but it was stopped by public pressure.

I tend to subconsciously skip over "weird" TLD sites in search results as they are usually SEO spam.

As if there are guarantees that gTLDs won't be sold to shady entities.

Summary: Many countries are bad. Therefore, avoid them all.

Will we ever live in a time where TLD conventions are abandoned entirely and websites just use a hashtag or something?

This is a solved problem. AFAIK there are not one, but multiple solutions for performant global routing without centralization. DHTs are an example.

Yes, that time was 1996-2002 or so, and they were called "AOL keywords".

There is no need; the current system works. Just don't register your domain in Afghanistan if you don't want to depend on... Afghanistan.

ccTLDs are controlled by an authority that IANA decides and IANA is controlled by the Govt of USA. So we know eventually who controls the domains. So maybe we come to 'all TLDs are actually created equal', eventually. (my point is - in the end USA controls all the domains, maybe via ICANN/IANA.)

>After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukranian Vice Prime Minister asked ICANN to suspend ccTLDs associated with Russia.

What's the point of ccTLDs if the US, a potential enemy, can still pull the rug out from under your feet?

Here's what happens if it goes ahead. Russia (and allied countries) ISPs update their config to point to root servers that do resolve .ru and .su, and they can then fallback to the usual servers for the rest of the world. And hey, maybe now they have that infra, they decide that in Russia, whitehouse.gov points somewhere else now

They expect that the US won't do that because it would violate Americans' expectations about good and evil.

Sure, the US has never done _anything_ that violates expectations about good and evil.

Of course they have. But in Western countries governments still need to sell their position to the public or it will typically cost them an election. So, typically, it's safe to expect on simple issues like letting Libya keep their ccTLD that they won't bother. The article gave another example about Ukraine where, as expected, they didn't bother.

Anybody can ask anyone to suspend a ccTLD. Doesn't mean they're going to do it.

There shouldn't be ccTLDs.

Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace. They're crowding the commons and taking useful suffixes.

But I'm also of the opinion these TLD namespaces shouldn't be bought and controlled by the highest bidders, nor domains by at volume squatters.

I’m more scared of TLD owners either changing ownership of domaine and/or price gouging than either of those things - if your TLD decides to 10x the cost of your domain, or sell the domain to your competitor, what are you gonna do?

Or just host an annual action, which would be the fairest way to determine the value of the domain.

Still, TLD registries know that if they make domains unattractive enough, some other identifier will come along.

Annual auction favours whoever has more money, which is fairly anti competitive too.

‘Other identifiers’ only happen at scale. 1000x the cost of fortune 500’s, or a single tld.

Kind of the whole point is that we don't want domain registrars to be able to extract "the value of the domain", quite the opposite, we could want to auction for the lowest bids for running the technical infrastructure to some appropriate standard, so that as much as possible of "the value of the domain" stays with people actually running services, not goes to someone as unearned rent of a namespace monopoly.

Well, the names obviously have value. Why would that value naturally rest with whoever registered it first? That's just another unearned monopoly.

Because a big part of that value comes only after - and only because - whoever registered the name invested into that brand, sometimes by continued business and reputation, sometimes by marketing.

For example, the name ycombinator.com has some value on its own, but I think you won't contest that the vast majority of the current value of that name arose only because a popular community was ran on this domain name for decades, and if hackernews was instead run on scombinator.com or whatever, then the value of ycombinator.com would be just a fraction of what it currently is.

It would only be fair if we assumed all people had an exact equal amount of resources and therefore if person A outbids person B, it's because it means more to person A than person B, rather than say person A having 100x the resources of person B.

We also don't force auction land off every year, because the costs (both financial and social) of that churn and insecurity are way worse than the gains from the resources being allocated for maximum economic value.

Make an .onion mirror and educate the masses.

There should be a way to abuse the tor network as a dns into the clear web.

Ah yes, grandma you should learn how to use tor so you can visit my e-commerce site through an obscure url that’s meaningless to you just be sure not to get scammed.

Tor has solved the centralized name service problem. Once it gets adopted up by browsers, your grandma only has to bookmark weird names.

Tor browser is not harder to use then Firefox or Chrome. And people don't type urls, they click on links.

I think I'm "people", and I type URLs.

Unironically, I agree to the first claim, and I think i2p merits even higher consideration.

Worthy attempts to resolve Zooko's triangle are going to require us to have trust in some stack, and it's hard to decentralize that appropriately. Namecoin may be one of the few examples of a b-word worth considering here. Ultimately, however, if the workers are to own the means of productions, there is no substitute for using and owning keys (and if that means people have to rely upon those they know and trust to assist them in this, then so be it). I don't predict that convention will arise in general, but I do prescribe it.

Disagree. ccTLDs at least let you know you're dealing with the country in question - revenue.gov.uk is more trustworthy than revenue.gov.buzz or some other rando gTLD.

People should generally just stop buying ccTLD domains for personal use. .ly, .ai, tv isn't as necessary or cool as they think it is.

Amusingly, the project/company that the person you're replying to is using .AI domain (see their HN bio), so clearly their opinions about how ccTLDs shouldn't exist can't be that strong

It shouldn't be a ccTLD.

Look at these arbitrary .ai ccTLD rules [1], as originally posted by p4bl0:

> The terms and conditions of .ai domain names include things such as "not asking for investors" (without an Anguilla license to be a bank, broker, public company, ICO, exchange, or gambling site) and "not violating copyrights", both of which are… complicated for a lot of AI-related startups that chose to use a .ai domain.

That's arbitrary and horrible. Thoughts shouldn't be so encumbered.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367730

These don't seem arbitrary but totally in line with what a ccTLD means.

Domains with the .ai TLD must obviously respect Anguilla law, just like the use .gov is restricted by the US government.

They mean .ai should exist but it shouldn't be managed by a foreign country. ;-)

I think they believe that .ai should exist as a TLD, but not as a ccTLD. They'd basically like the Anguilles to not be in control of this TLD. Using it despite that is not inconsistent.

Not that I agree with them, by the way. ccTLDs have to exist, countries have an obvious write to host their own TLDs without having to rely on others.

> People should generally just stop buying ccTLD domains for personal use.

firstname@lastname.countryCode email addresses look good tho.

>People should generally just stop buying ccTLD domains for personal use.

People should buy ccTLDs more often. I try to stick to domains in my country TLD when possible, instead of getting a generic (.com) one.

> Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace.

Isn't that exactly how it works? The top level namespace is ".", every goverment controls a namespace under that.

Or do you mean that we should have .se.gov, .uk.gov and no government control over non-.gov domains?

> Or do you mean that we should have .se.gov, .uk.gov and no government control over non-.gov domains?

Yes, that would be a substantial improvement.

uk.gob us.gob etc. though. Why should we use the English word for government?

OP is a classic imperial citizen with no concept of the world outside his empire

Is http the correct abbreviation for your language's translation of hypertext transport protocol?

Because for most international standards we based it either on french or english. Recently (the last half century or so) it's been a lot more english, which is nice since it's the most widely spoken language.

> Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace.

Do you want something like `foo.us.com` (instead of `foo.com.us`)? That doesn't sound like a meaningful difference, and can be worse than the status quo especially given that different governments would want a different set of second-level domains anyway.

Not really relevant, but "us.com" is a weird type of sub-top-level domain now, I think some other "cc.com" domains have popped up as well.

I have mixed feelings on this.

On one hand, as an outsider it seems like every country needs to bow down their heads to the North American ICANN to ask for permission to have their own TLD listed in their root servers (even if those servers are already located in the country that's asking for permissions).

But on the other hand, even if every country actually owned their root DNS servers and were completely independent from each other on this regard, everyone already expects the internet to work a certain way. So keeping things like they are now is the more pragmatic way to go.

It would be doable in an alternate universe, e.g. every domain is local except those who have a specific TLD for international stuff. Similar to how country calling codes work; all numbers are national unless you use "+something" or "00something". So companies would have "home advantage" with their domain names because users from their own country wouldn't need the international TLD.

(Yes, there's issues and things to think about if things were done that way, and I can certainly make this message longer, but everyone everywhere is already used to how things work now so there's not much point.)

There's a similar "issue" with IP addresses (which are controlled by North American IANA (which is controlled by North American ICANN)), but in that case it's easier to solve because they are more invisible, not something the common person deals with daily.

That's clearly a very bad idea. Maybe .gov was supposed to be that initially? The USA have it for themselves alone. Thankfully other countries have their ccTLD and can reserve a subdomain for their government official websites, like .gouv.fr in France, because they can't have .fr.gov (which would look strange anyway, since "gov" is a shorthand for the english word).

And this is not the only instance. Initially, the .edu was for all education institutions, but at some point it was unilaterally decided that only higher education institutions in the USA should be authorized to use such domains, which is a shame. For institutions still using it outside the US because they registered it before this decision, a single mishaps like missing the renewal deadline and they won't ever be able to get their domain back. And .edu can only be renewed in the last two weeks before expiration (thankfully now it is possible to pay for three years at once rather than a single one but that's recent).

So, the history of US-centric management of the internet strongly suggest that it's a good idea that countries have and can control their own TLD. Even if a few people feel like their vanity domain name should use what happens to be a ccTLD.

> Maybe .gov was supposed to be that initially? The USA have it for themselves alone.

.gov dates to 1984, back when the internet was the ARPA-Internet. At the time the whole thing was a US military network that some research institutions were permitted to connect to. .edu was never intended to be used for every school in the world, just the institutions collaborating on US government research.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc920

If you think about the history of the internet from today's international perspective, it sounds strange, because it never was that from the beginning. It always was a US military computer network that grew way beyond the initial intent. It wasn't until 2016 that the US government decided to hand over control to the international community.

> .edu was never intended to be used for every school in the world

There was a time when .edu domains were attributed upon simple requests as long as you were an education related institution, from wherever in the world. It only later became paid, and then restricted to US institutions in 2001 (that is 16 years after the creation of the .edu TLD, contrary to what you say). I know this because I inherited the management of such a domain for a French university directly from the person who created it back then and who told me the whole history of how they got hold of this domain name.

I insist on saying "institutions" and not "schools" because it's what I can see. Examples still in use in France includes polytechnique.edu [1] but also snes.edu, which is the website of the main workers union for middle and high school teachers in France (SNES-FSU).

Also, note that nothing in its text seems to limit the scope of the RFC 920, the one you linked, to the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_polytechnique

Correct, .edu wasn't explicitly restricted to US institutions. But at that time, the entire ARPA-internet as a whole was only used by institutions that were doing something related to US government research. There wasn't really a thought to restrict domain usage for anyone, because the entire network was restricted access. The ARPA-internet wasn't open to the public, and things like websites and ISPs didn't exist. It was just a tool for researchers to use at work. The idea that .edu would ever accommodate a middle school teachers' union in France was not on anybody's radar.

How’s the connectivity in Anguilla?

There shouldn't be any gTLDs. Registrations for legacy TLDs should have closed when ccTLDs were introduced. There is no other generally accepted division of world except countries with their sovereignity. All entities with presence on internet are generally subject to some country. The handful of other entities (UN etc) can be handled as special cases.

I'm still salty about the .eu thing. I was an EU citizen for 42 years of my life and I used a .eu domain as my primary email address for many years. Not only did the EU decide I could not longer have it, they've made it available for anyone to register.

Hundreds of my website registrations were tied to that email address. Thankfully I had sufficient advance notice to tediously re-register the majority of sites to a non-.eu domain email. But there are still a few I didn't catch.

Thanks for that, EU. (Edit: thanks also to the Brexit voters, yes .... but I still contend that the EU could have made an accomodation for existing registrants to hold onto their domains, instead of take them away and re-list them for anyone to get.

Edit 2: Of course, any Brit well-resourced enough to set up some kind of shell company in EU to hold on to their domain will have been able to keep it. So the claim that "UK people should not be able to own .eu domain. It's confusing and misleading" does not hold water ... it's perfectly possible to do so even today by various trickery. So this decision only affects regular people. Not big business or the very wealthy.)

I guess it’s a weird thought experiment, but what if scotland left the UK, should they still have rights to use .uk tld’s? Maybe yes for historical reasons but it is a twee bit odd to have what is essentially a foreign entity representing themselves with your name.

Do you UK? Or have you always resided outside the EU?

I would argue for a "grandfathering in" provision. Both in the Brexit case and your hypothetical Scexit.

So, if Scotland became independent, the remaining UK might close the .uk ccTLD for new Scottish registrations but existing domain holders should have the right to retain their registrations indefinitely.

I think it's ethically wrong to forcible take away someone's domain name without exceptionally good reason (such as abusive use of domain or whatever).

(Yes, I am a UK citizen. By "the .eu thing" I was referring to the situation as described in the article.)

First, nobody owns a domain; it is assigned to a registrant, by the registry, via the registrar. No domain "owner" has ownership rights; you have the right to use the domain subject to the rules of the registry. If the rules of the registry require the registrant to be a citizen or body of the EU and the registrant no longer meets that requirement, the registrant loses the right to use the domain.

Your proposed solution of grandfathering existing registrations would cause confusion or uncertainty for end users (site visitors) who could not ascertain with confidence that the organisation with which they were dealing was actually in the EU, or registered to an EU citizen or body.

Your assertion that the EU enforced the established rules because they were "being dicks" to the UK is similar to the anti-EU tropes spouted by the anti-EU press in the UK, eg the EU is punishing Brits by making them use non-EU passport lanes, restricting their visits to 90 days, etc. Your fellow citizens voted (unfortunately) to leave the organisation and these are the consequences of non-membership. If you decide to leave your golf club, you don't get to continue using the golf course and clubhouse.

> Your proposed solution of grandfathering existing registrations would cause confusion or uncertainty for end users (site visitors) who could not ascertain with confidence that the organisation with which they were dealing was actually in the EU, or registered to an EU citizen or body.

I don't buy that argument. A UK citizen can still register .eu TLD through a company they control in the EU, if they have the resources to do so. The EU's decision to rescind registrations for former EU citizens only really affects non-wealthy private citizens. The wealthy, and large companies, can get around the rule.

Secondly, there is precendent for this kind of thing. When Soviet Union broke up, .su domains registrants were allowed to keep their registrations despite now being Ukrainian or Estonian or whatever citizens. Similarly when Yugoslavia broke up, .yu registrants could keep theirs, they weren't forced to surrender.

Edit: And a union of nation states is not like a golf club. You cannot reduce the argument by analogy to a sports club membership. A political union is much more complex than that.

Citizenship, free movement etc., or course those could not continue after Brexit. Those are politically fundamental.

But when it comes to internet's DNS system, people have lives and businesses that are contingent on maintining exclusive control of a given set of characters on a DNS server. Basic security of the internet is built around the expectation of being able to maintain indefinite control of a domain.

Sure, the EU rules said domain owners must reside in EU/EEA but I expect that the possibility of a country leaving EU was not considered when that rule was written (certainly, I did not consider it at the time I registered the domain). It would be prudent and reasonable to revisit those rules in light of such a significant and unexpexted event as Brexit and the significant problems it would cause to affected existing .eu domain registrants. But no, this was simply impossible -- rules are rules! /s

Edit 2: Indeed, the EU did rewrite the rules. Because EU citizens remaining residing in the UK would also lose their registrations, the EU rewrote to rules to allow citizenship as well as residence to be a qualification for domain registration. So the argument that the rules were fixed in stone and known by everyone, and so should not be changed, does not hold water either. The EU did change the rules to account for Brexit. But chose to do harm to existing domain registrants from the UK anyway for no apparent benefit to anyone.

If I look at the differences between what cite as precedent and the UK/EU situation it's that the EU continues functioning whereas Yugoslavia and Soviet Union did not.

Maybe more impetuous to protect EU institutions from impersonation? Not sure.

> I don't buy that argument. A UK citizen can still register .eu TLD through a company they control in the EU, if they have the resources to do so. The EU's decision to rescind registrations for former EU citizens only really affects non-wealthy private citizens. The wealthy, and large companies, can get around the rule.

Regrettably, this is true of most rules.

> But when it comes to internet's DNS system, people have lives and businesses that are contingent on maintining exclusive control of a given set of characters on a DNS server.

People had lives and businesses that were contingent on a great many things that were lost to Brexit.

It seems like maybe you think of the TLD problem as a special case because it affected you so directly and significantly and is within your area of expertise. (I don't mean this as a criticism, it's completely normal and I've no doubt I would do the same.) But really I don't think it's particularly different from all of the other administrative problems that Brexit created.

> But when it comes to internet's DNS system, people have lives and businesses

Seriously?

People had lives and businesses reliant on the UK being a member of the EU — there were hundreds of stories of people who were spending lots of time in the EU caring for relatives, or running their business, but not enough time to claim residence in the EU.

That all got thrown under the bus by the Tories, the domain names is a minor detail in comparison.

(Note the .yu domain was removed in 2010 after a 3 year transition period, but for some reason .su remains.)

At least .yu was completely terminated. Wheras the confiscated .eu domains are now being re-listed for anyone to register! Anyone can now claim my old email address and I can do nothing to stop it. This is what bugs me the most about the whole thing.

.uk is not actually a ccTLD - the country code is really gb. .gb is delegated, but unused.

Oh wow, really? That's insane and such an absurd oversight.

Given that the government literally uses gov.uk and ac.uk for academic institutions.

EDIT: seems one of us is wrong;

> .uk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United Kingdom. It was first registered in July 1985, seven months after the original generic top-level domains such as .com and the first country code after .us.

It's in a weird state where it was manually delegated before the ISO-based ones were created. So it's not actually a ccTLD, but is treated as one.

This is not correct. `.uk` is a ccTLD, and it isn't the ISO 3166 code for the UK, which is `gb`.

These are two different systems with substantial overlap.

And in FIPS "GB" is Gabon, leading to all sorts of fun.

Assuming this is because of Brexit, it was the UK that decided that, so you should thank them. The rule that the domain is EU/EEA-only already existed and was clear.

Well, I'm a citizen of the UK and I voted in the referendum to stay in the EU.

The EU could have agreed to change its TLD ownershipo rules rules (which they actually have done recently, so the rules are not set in stone) to introduce a grandfathering-in provision if they had wanted to. Close it for new registrations but allow existing resistratnts to continue to renew.

But it seems they chose to be dicks about it, perhaps to spite the UK I guess. Maybe to send a warning to other truculent EU countries. I can't say I understand their reasoning. Perhaps just petty bureaucracy at work.

But now that the precedent is set, other EU citizens should be very wary of using .eu domains. There's no guarantee that your country will remain in the EU forever either.

Doing that for spite is a very short-sighted thing indeed.

I think Hanlon's razor offers a better explanation

it was spite: the EU Commission explicitly said it wanted those domains cancelled and that the rules would not be changed

Funny enough Hanlon's razor still applies because in this case the stupidity lies in the counterproductive use of malice.

Why counterproductive? It has become remarkably quiet on the front of countries making plans to leave the EU.

Insightful remark, nevertheless.

There was spite involved, and for good reason.

> But it seems they chose to be dicks about it, perhaps to spite the UK I guess. Maybe to send a warning to other truculent EU countries.

Well, of course the EU chose to be dicks about it - the various UK governments did all their best to ensure an as-chaotic-as-possible Brexit, constantly derailing discussions, even risking setting the Northern Ireland civil war alight again and demand that the EU concede to prevent that.

It was dumb enough that Brexit happened in the first place (some say, the vote was close enough that Russian propaganda made the key difference), but the way that Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and now Sunak have handled Brexit made an already bad situation even worse. Had they shown even the slightest bit of respect and solution-oriented thinking towards the EU, the EU negotiators would have been far more interested in solutions that don't mess up stuff too much.

Yes but… Some current EU states have not exactly covered themselves in glory whilst their elected governments have rode roughshod over some of the EU’s most fundamental principles, and what sanctions have their citizens faced?

I’m not proud of the UK when it comes to Brexit, but I can’t take the whole ‘follow the rules of the club / stay in it to enjoy the benefits’ seriously anymore.

I assume you're referring to pre-Tusk Poland and Hungary? If yes, I agree with you... the key problem is that the EU has been founded on the implicit assumption that its members would follow the law and if they wouldn't they would at least follow the courts. That held up for a long time, and then populism took over, but by the time that was realized there were too many countries in the EU to ever get consensus to truly fix this issue.

American politics suffer from the same issue IMHO, their system can't cope with the Republicans being willfully obstructionist for decades now.

Indeed - and so this explains why I roll my eyes at silly comments along the lines as 'they [Brits] voted for it, let them stand in a queue at the airport or lose their .eu domains'.

It would seem to be more equitable to me a least (someone who voted remain and lives in the EU) if the ballot had presented the options of "Remain" or "Remain and ignore all of the rules". But I don't think that would be particularly popular with the rest of the EU populace, and yet, effectively, it's what's happening.

> Indeed - and so this explains why I roll my eyes at silly comments along the lines as 'they [Brits] voted for it, let them stand in a queue at the airport or lose their .eu domains'.

For me, the most sad thing to see was that despite all of these issues and the utterly insane blunders of the last years that weren't even related to Brexit or Covid, the Tories are still in charge...

I have a slightly controversial opinion on this in that I apportion quite a lot of the blame onto Labour at the time too - pre Johnson (i.e. the Corbyn years) what effective opposition was there? Why did they then perform so utterly poorly in the election? It’s one thing to be popular with a vocal segment of enthusiasts, but unfortunately they only count votes.

And yes, first past the post and all that, but there was still an incredibly clear swing on the popular vote (-8%) away from them.

Well we haven't actually had an election since 2019

I don't think it's fair to expect the EU to bend over backwards to accommodate the defectors after how they behaved. The UK knew what would happen and they choose that path anyway throwing a large number of UK citizens under the bus. It's unfortunate that they made that choice, but it's not the fault of the EU and it's not the EU's responsibility.

It also seems a bit unfair to suggest that .eu domains aren't dependable as if the same thing could happen without warning to any member country considering that the precedent established is that it would only happen to countries that insist on it happening to them.

>The UK knew what would happen and they choose that path anyway throwing a large number of UK citizens under the bus.

The politicians definitely all know it wouid be a disaster - Gove and Johnson's faces on the day of the result look like they're at a funeral.

The public, however, insisted that "we knew what we was voting for", verbally abusing anyone who asked them what that actually was, and now are claiming that "this isn't what we voted for". Well, it was, and you were told so. Let me play the world's smallest violin in sympathy.

> The public

51.8% of the voting public

In addition: after the referendum, the EU offered all kinds of options to make it a soft Brexit, but those same politicians drew unnecessarily strong red lines (and are still doing so regarding Northern Ireland) in order to appease a tiny extremist minority in their party. There's only so much the EU can do. Decisions have consequences, and I can't blame the EU for being a bit too strict now and then in response to that kind of game-playing and plain incompetence.

> Well, I'm a citizen of the UK and I voted in the referendum to stay in the EU.

Welcome to democracy.

As an EU citizen, I am against allowing leaving countries to keep their priviledges. Either in or out. But this kind of whining from the no-brexit fraction is really pathetic.

OPs citizenship was removed from him without his approval, based on the minority votes of U.K. and foreigners living in the U.K., it is a travesty.

That is a travesty, but still the UK's fault for allowing it to happen in the first place not the EU's

See also the periodic complaints about UK tourists being discriminated against in airports for having the slower non-EU line.

Only idiots would compain about passport control queues. It's nothing like the .eu domain issue at all. A costless administrative accomodation could easily have been made.

Sadly the majority of people who didn’t want this are also affected.

I had no problem with a bunch of daily mail readers giving up their freedoms it’s when they took the freedoms of me and my children away that I got annoyed.

Imagine if Texas seceded from the USA and suddenly anyone born in Texas had their American citizenship revoked

If you can't be arsed to vote it's because you don't care about the outcome.

The OP may have voted and been in the minority.

Or because you were born after 1998

If this happened because you're in the UK, it's not the EU's fault we left and you're blaming the wrong people.

Let's not get into Brexit mud-slinging. I simply contend that EU could have made a more reasonable accomodation for existing UK holders of .eu domains.

I think it's perfectly reasonable not to offer the UK special treatment over other nations. It would certainly have been more generous to allow UK registrants to retain their domains, but it doesn't seem to me more reasonable. The EU's responsibility is to its members, and they negotiated the withdrawal agreement accordingly.

The UK could, of course, have made access to the .eu TLD a higher priority when negotiating the withdrawal agreement. I expect we could have secured it. I don't see any reason to believe that the EU witheld it unreasonably.

I don't think it's mud-slinging to point out that the EU didn't kick us out!

Could have, but shouldn't.

The RU did not have to remove the citizenship from millions of people who were born EU citizens and had no say in the minority decision to leave the EU

I'm sure Russia did no such thing!

It doesn't have to withold citizenship from anyone. In some ways it's more reasonable that I lost my EU citizenship through a democratic process in my country than that, say, a Turkish person doesn't have EU citizenship because the process of joining has taken so long.

I'd like to still be an EU citizen but I don't see how it's the EU's fault that I'm not.

> but I still contend that the EU could have made an accomodation for existing registrants to hold onto their domains

Sure, and I completely understand your position. But... well many other UK citizen had at least some inconvenience resulting from the Brexit. Should the EU have gone out of their way to accommodate everyone from the country that essentially said "I don't care about the EU anymore"?

If you could leave the EU, keep all the benefits of being in the EU and get all the benefits of not being in the EU all at the same time, then there would be no EU. So yeah... you can't have it all :-).

Good reminder that personal domains should not be chosen as `.eu` though.

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