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Comment by jjmarr | Hacker News Reader

Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use.

[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq...

[2] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZ...

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Australia does the same for organizations regulated at the state level, like schools. However, while all other states/territories do $SCHOOL.$STATE.edu.au:

https://www.abbotsfordps.vic.edu.au/

https://southperthps.wa.edu.au/

https://perthprimary.education.tas.edu.au/

https://nthadelaideps.sa.edu.au/

https://www.nightcliffprimary.nt.edu.au/

https://www.forrestps.act.edu.au/

NSW uses $SCHOOL.schools.nsw.gov.au:

https://innersydneyhighschool.schools.nsw.gov.au/

And Queensland for some bizarre reason uses "eq" ("Education in Queensland", apparently) instead of the standard "qld":

https://townsvillesouthss.eq.edu.au/

For Queensland it looks like private schools get a .qld.edu.au domain and state schools get an .eq.edu.au one. For example: https://www.twgs.qld.edu.au/ .

When I was at university, we had http://cs.mu.oz.au (Computer Science, at University of Melbourne). That domain name has stuck in my head, even though it isn't in use anymore.

In Norway we have kommune.no for municipalities.

For example:

- Oslo https://www.oslo.kommune.no/ the largest municipality in terms of population, and home of Oslo the capital of Norway

- Utsira http://www.utsira.kommune.no/ the smallest municipality in terms of population with just 217 people per 2025.

- Nordkapp https://www.nordkapp.kommune.no/ home of the famous Nordkapp (North Cape)

And there is vgs.no for High Schools.

For example:

- Elvebakken videregående skole https://elvebakken.vgs.no/

- Nydalen videregående skole https://nydalen.vgs.no/

- Foss videregående skole https://foss.vgs.no/

These two and some others are called category domains and are managed by Norid, who also run the .no registry as a whole.

https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#4.-A...

country wide like that must be a bit of a pain for local web admins for those municipalities to make changes through the bureaucracy of government DNS/registrar keyholders. I have a friend who works for a university web services and adding any subdomain takes months to a year+ with committees, boards, meetings and approvals they have to go through first

Oslo Commune will have control of oslo.kommune.no, i.e. there are DNS records pointing to the commune's DNS server.

It's no different to administer than if they had oslokommune.no.

(Just like dealing with bbc.co.uk is no different to administer than bbc.com.)

For dot-ca, it (used to be) historically mandated that you had to use the 'closest' geographic locale for your domain, which is how we got https://transit.toronto.on.ca (which now goes to https://transittoronto.ca).

At some point CIRA (the non-profit that now runs .ca) stopped making that a requirement.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca

There are still rules on who gets priority on names: toronto.ca is the government but toronto.com is a news organization; ditto for canada.ca and canada.com; ontario.ca versus ontario.com; etc.

The three/four-level domains are now generally grandfathered.

in what I find to be unfortunate, I have noticed a trend in the reverse direction.

http://shoreviewmn.gov/ should have a dot between the city and the state. they chose some form of human usability over precision. I trust it ever so slightly less, because it is cute before hierarchical.

https://www.mvpschools.org/ formerly https://www.moundsviewschools.org are the domain names for a school district. The fact they chose the P between mv and school (which stands for public) makes it look like phishing or social engineering. It erodes trust in both technical decisions and branding decisions made.

Because domains are hard to read, and people were never taught to read them, we lost out on being able to establish trust because something reads "mv.k12.mn.us" (or preferably us.mn.k12.mv) which is two characters SHORTER than mvpschools.org!

My old school district moved from a localized URL of this kind to a .org a number of years ago (in the early 2010s). It seems to just have become the style, but I never really got it. I'm sure there was a significant cost to migrating what was a perfectly working setup to a whole new domain for website and email!

Freenet.Hamilton.on.ca got me online in the early days!

I recall a rather tech-savvy teacher struggling to write his school-board provided email address for students to submit some assignments to.

Was something reasonable until the @firstclass.schoolname.xyzdsb.city.on.ca or some related silliness

www.gov.mb.ca www.gov.nb.ca www.gov.pe.ca www.gov.ns.ca www.gov.ab.ca www.gov.bc.ca www.gov.on.ca www.gov.nf.ca www.gov.yt.ca www.gov.nt.ca www.gov.nu.ca

Some redirect. Sask. and Que. break the pattern, but both have various government sites under .gov.sk.ca and .gouv.qc.ca (comme de juste).

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