Except that as a english speaking non american, this happens literally all the time with ecommerce?
It's not until I get to checkout I realise they do not ship to my country or want to deal with me.
It's not until I get to checkout I realise they do not ship to my country or want to deal with me.
Why?
I'm not saying this is good or bad or justified or not, just saying what the conventions are.
co.uk, com.au, com.mx, com.my and co.jp exist for example, but I have never heard of a co.fr, com.it or co.de or org.dk
Bottom line: there is no real convention
I expect some countries like the UK and Australia to use something like `co.uk`. I expect many countries to use their own top-level domain. I do not assume that some `.com` website is American.
Is “the only” based on experience? How many websites from how many countries have you come across?
> I'm not saying this is good or bad or justified or not, just saying what the conventions are.
Do people associate `.com` with “company”? Or just “regular website”? Are people even stopped from making a `.com` if they don’t have a “company”?
Is this Swiss business allowed to use `.com` because they have offices in the US of A?
If it's clearly local to somewhere (news, shopping, etc.) as opposed to global or a webapp or something, and doesn't say it's specific to any other country, then yes people generally assume it's American.
Because when sites are intended for audiences in other countries, they usually use a country-specific TLD. Which, for historical reasons, never became a convention in the US since it's where the Internet was invented.
If you haven't noticed that this is a clear pattern, I don't know what to tell you.
Random examples of foreign brands/companys in completely different industries: https://www.nestle.com is the "global" address of Nestle, a Swiss company. Mitsubushi, a japanes company uses https://www.mitsubishi.com with a /ja subpath to handle japanese language. The FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association which was founded in Paris, France and is know headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, uses fifa.com as its main domain despite having several regional office accross the globe but none in the US.
And the web by a Brit working in Switzerland. It all runs on Chinese hardware with software written by people (and their dogs) from every nation on earth.
The point, if there is one, is buried in the details.
Here, read the history:
USAmerican have .us, i don't need a reason why you would need to claim that .com is USAmerican, unless you live in a very small bubble