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.
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.
.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.
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.
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.
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.
Domains with the .ai TLD must obviously respect Anguilla law, just like the use .gov is restricted by the US government.
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.
firstname@lastname.countryCode email addresses look good tho.
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.
Still, TLD registries know that if they make domains unattractive enough, some other identifier will come along.
‘Other identifiers’ only happen at scale. 1000x the cost of fortune 500’s, or a single tld.
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.
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.
There should be a way to abuse the tor network as a dns into the clear web.
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.
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?
Yes, that would be a substantial improvement.
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.
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.