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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

> Why are these US only? It’s a conundrum which we probably don’t regularly need to worry about, but it’s unusual all the same (I’d love to hear insight on why there’s no .us on these).

History of the internet: it was invented as a US department of defense research project, and grew into the beast it is today. You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US. Note that .uk exists for the same reason -- it should be .gb, which is the country code, but the UK had already been naming everything with "uk" internally.

So the .edu, .mil, .gov, and .uk got grandfathered in. Others disappeared: ARPA, NATO, Czechoslovakia. People can still register .su domains, if they like -- that's the country code for the Soviet Union.

Once a TLD sees enough use, there's no real way to get rid of it.

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My favorite TLD was .oz for Australia. Sadly, that one was deleted in the name of "consistency", and we all had to get used to it.

The net was once a fun place managed by smart people, consensus, and working code. Now, a million times larger, all we can hope for is neutrality or ineffectiveness.

The fact that the US doesn't use its country TLD is analogous to the way that the UK doesn't have to specify their country name on their postage stamps.

You get certain privileges for pioneering the development of a communications system, I guess.

Also, the sheer PITA nature of the .us domain, early on, when it was hard to get a .us address if you weren't a state or municipal government.

True, though .uk is more correct (Great Britain doesn't include Northern Ireland) and is reserved by the United Kingdom in ISO 3166

I'd agree if it weren't for the confusion it generates, as ISO country codes GB/GBR counter-intuitively don't map to a TLD.

Also, Ukraine got shafted into another mismatch (UA is TLD and ISO alpha-2, UKR is alpha-3), although in their case one could say the country wasn't around when ISO codes were formulated. Some Linux distributions used to have a UK keymap which was... ukrainian. That was a lot of fun to fix (not).

Also, as a citizen of the UK, I really like any move away from the whole "great" in Great Britain. It makes us sound like we’re run by Hafez Aladeen from The Dictator or something.

> You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US.

The .com tld was created in 1984, at which point there had already been international links for over a decade, so that doesn't really support the argument.

I thought that the links, at the time, went mostly to other networks -- ones running X.25 or something.

X.25 - that is a blast from the past. I think JANET and Autonet had gateways where you could hop from one to the other (ie, TCP/IP to X.25).

.arpa didn't disappear, it changed its purpose.

Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm curious.

"The domain name arpa is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. It is used exclusively for technical infrastructure purposes. While the name originally was the acronym for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the funding organization in the United States that developed one of the precursors of the Internet (ARPANET), it now stands for Address and Routing Parameter Area."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.arpa

Yes. Used for reverse DNS lookups.

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