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Comment by adw | Hacker News Reader

There are many examples; k12.<state>.us is another.

It is (or was for a long time, IDK) a strongly recommended practice from ICANN. I imagine nearly all countries to do that.

There end up being some weird edge cases where there are some countries which have both the equivalent of .co.uk but also allow registrations directly under the two-letter country code as well. .mx is one such case where most business are, e.g., costco.com.mx, but it’s also possible to register directly under .mx as well so Toyota Mexico is toyota.mx and not toyota.com.mx (the latter is registered, and ostensibly to Toyota, but the whois and nslookup records give very different results and the website doesn’t load when I try to visit it).

uk is one example - they opened up x.uk later, and gave x.co.uk registrations first dibs.

This isn't so bad as .com.mx and .mx should be on the public suffix list then.

But letting arbitrary customers take arbitrary 3 level domains, and others take 2 level domains, seems like a mistake as it's not very reasonable for every 3LD customer to put the 2LD on the public suffix list, but mixing 3LD and 2LD registrations means you can't public suffix *.name.

Seems the whole idea of having both was always misguided.

Except nobody uses the .us tld, but pretty much every every Japanese company is on a .co.jp

Schools use it!

Based on my small sample of schools, all of the ones that were using locality based names under ca.us have migrated elsewhere, including to 2nd level domains under .us.

> Except nobody uses the .us tld

This is a bug, not a feature.

It used to be that only Japanese corporations could register a .co.jp while anyone else anywhere could register for a .jp. So I had several .jp domains registered through Gandi.net.

The issue is that .jp registered outside of a few Japanese registrars are legally not allowed to offer Whois privacy.

The .us domain should’ve been universally useful for state and municipal governments, but most of those began registering directly under .gov, and not even in an orderly hierarchy under .st.gov

But that was simply the easiest way to market your website as a trusted government entity. And now nobody has ever heard of .us domains in active use.

.us was primarily a hierarchy structure which in practice made confusing and hard to remember domain names, whereas .gov addresses hand out single domains which are generally easy to remember.

Personally, I never saw anything confusing about city.state.us; the hierarchy was organized perfectly logically in the 3-tier jurisdictional structure that every American schoolboy knows by 3rd grade.

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

But your point about them being rather longer and difficult to remember stands, and the same for a .gov, which could be shorter and catchier.

However amusingly, .us opened up second-level registrations 24 years ago, which means that any qualifying entity could have their name registered directly under .us, which is obviously recognizable, and also one character shorter, than a .gov registration. However, by that time, I believe that .gov had increased in stature so that registering governmental entities under .gov carried more certainty of conveying official status than anything under .us.

Also sadly, QR Codes and URL shorteners today sort of obviate the need to directly register the shortest possible domain name. I don't know: I was always kind of fond of the .us hierarchy, and I'm just personally sad that it's fading away.

City/state/US is logical, the problem is most other hierarchies confuse people. For instance k12 subdomains for schools couldn't use that nomenclature because school districts do not map cleanly to towns. And that's before you talk about fire departments, townships, libraries, park districts, and countless other governmental bodies and districts which have overlapping boundaries of their own.

.gov certainly cares a level of exclusionary access that isn't really true of .us. Only one entity, the US federal government, can decide to hand someone a .gov address. And generally there is few signals harder to fake or impersonate than one.

> city.state.us

In reality, it wasn't that simple, and a lot of those .us domains looked like line noise.

Government sites are used to distribute public information. They need something they can print on a poster/sign. Not some bogus 'logical' hierarchy.

It’s not something anyone else in the world seems to struggle with, where there are *.gov.uk, *.edu.au etc.

If anything the .gov, .mil and .edu being just American is confusing, as well plainly inappropriate (it feels like an American cultural imperialist thing to people from outside the US). It would have been much better if those had been retired decades ago and moved to under the .us TLD, so e.g. whatever.edu would become whatever.edu.us like every other country. Any existing domains on .gov, .mil, .edu etc. should only be allowed to exist as 301 redirects.

It's imperialist to own and control the thing you created?

If .gov had been an international TLD that was at some point available to everyone, or had been created by everyone, ok. But .gov was created as part of the work the US government did to build out the initial DNS structure. It probably wasn't even a given at the time that arpanet would be international in nature

Also, 301 redirects are not a DNS thing, that is an HTTP thing. Not sure how that would solve your problem since HTTP is intrinsically at the base of it tied to just A or AAAA records. DNS does a lot more than pointing to websites

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