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Comment by fosap | Hacker News Reader

In defense of the current status: You are all misusing (or absuing) the DNS. Do you live in (or target) the British Indian Ocean Territory? No? Then this domain is not meant for you. This is a hack, and I don't like it. (For the same reason i don't like the new gTLDs) This sound a bit like a complain that reading Shakespeare in hexspeak is not very pleasant.

/Edit: Sorry for beating a dead horse. I know TLDs are not used the way I think they should be used. But I think it was important to point out once again that this is a dirty hack. It works, but when working outside of the spec you should be aware of it a accept shortcomings. Not saying you should not ask google to route around it. But it has it limits. ".at" are meant for Austria and not for email providers, that's something they just should deal with.

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That ship has long sailed. Saying people are abusing DNS by using a country level domain is like saying people are abusing the word 'awful' when they use it to mean 'bad'.

People _are_ using TLDs in this way, and the relevant countries, registrars, and ICANN seem happy to let them. It has no impact on the internet, other than freeing up a whole bunch of domain names, thereby lowering the price for everybody.

[responding to your edit]

...If you think things shouldn't be hacked, then maybe "Hacker News" is not the site for you?

Everything is a "hack" on something else. When we invented the wheel, we noticed that round things were easier to move than square things. When we invented fire, we noticed that rubbing two sticks together produced something that kept you warm.

It's evolution. The alternative is to stay with what we've got today, just because.

Sure, "everything" might be a hack, but you should recognize that a hack is a workaround - and understand the limitations when you implement it (rather than acting surprised afterwards and asking for someone to change the rules).

If they were suing Google or anything like that, you'd be right. But they're not. They're just saying "Google, your index would be more accurate if you made this change".

They have figured out a limitation, think it's unnecessary, and are suggesting a way of making the system better. They're using the blog post to encourage others to support the suggestion.

Absolutely nothing wrong with hacking. But when i write my own userland i do not recommend it for production. And i do not compare my own radio with a B&O HiFi, and not my cart with a Porsche.

/edit:

Hacks are great. Hacks are evolutionary. Something like "hire and fire". If a hack does not work, try a something different! And this just seems not work very well.

It turns out that we've got massive domain squatting, America somehow snagged .com instead of .us, England decided to use .co.uk for no apparent reason, there's seemingly some sort of massive corruption going on in ICANN 'selling' tlds, etc., etc.

i.e. the whole thing turned into a complete and utter farce long ago.

In the end it's not a perfect world and it's a hack because the very tld domain system itself was woefully broken even in conception.

> England decided to use .co.uk for no apparent reason

Eh? The UK (not "England") use .uk. This is then subdivided into .co.uk, .ac.uk, .org.uk, .gov.uk and many more depending on the type of organisation, as ccTLDs were initially envisioned, i.e. type.country

Why wan't it .co.us then? Or .com.uk? At best it's meaningless, at worse the US was the very first domain squatter sitting on all the tlds.

What actually happened is a massive waste of money paying for stupid extra domain names to stop someone else impersonating you. It's just historical.

And now they claim their increasingly worrying and opaque laws apply to any website that uses it, which is even worse for us all.

That the UK decided to then follow the naming convention (or any other country that did) is a waste of letters.

Total farce.

(I did actually mean UK, I'm English and it was a slip)

Because county tlds organization is devolved to that country duh they each do their own thing.

.co.x vs .com.x is arbitrary. But .uk should be .gb technically.

Actually, .gb exists as well, but the subdomain is dra.hmg.gb.

.uk was created before the standard was agreed, and the UK was allowed to keep using it.

England has chosen to split up their tld into .ac.uk, .co.uk, .gov.uk etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk

Because the Americans owned ICANN, they got away with first-level domains for everything, .com, .gov, ... Other countries had to either put everything under one domain, or split it up like the brits.

That is some terrible revisionist history.

.com, .net, .gov etc. were the first TLDs created in the early 1980s (when the DNS was invented, before ICANN existed). Only later in the mid 1980s were country codes added to the repertoire, and each country was given one based on the ISO 3166 standard — including the US (.us).

The only domains with geographic prohibitions were .gov and .mil, being run by the US Government. People of all countries have always been able to register domains in .com, .net etc., not just Americans.

Anyone can register a .com, .net, .org address, but the registries are subject to US law. So, for instance, US courts can order a .com domain taken down, even if it points to servers in another country.

United Kingdom, not England.

What's wrong with .co.uk? It's the same in Japan: .co.jp, .ac.jp, .or.jp... And I think it's good.

http://nic.io/ runs this TLD and specifically targets it toward "the next generation of social websites"

Interesting tidbit, their logo looks a lot like the one for Google I/O 2012: https://developers.google.com/events/io/2012/

They should use google.io for the Google I/O events.

The British Indian Ocean Territory does not have a "general population". It's a perfectly good waste of a short and meaningful TLD, which we already have a few of as it is.

.io isn't the only one either. There's quite a few ccTLD for countries that don't exist, never existed, or have never had a permant population. I can't imagine Google does geographical targeting for the lesser used ones like .co.ck. (for the Cook Islands off Australia).

Another one is the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which have the .hm ccTLD [1] despite having no human inhabitants.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heard_Island_and_McDonald_Islan...

Edit: Corrected domain. Thanks @jonemo.

.hn is Honduras, I think you meant to type .hm

If you are wondering if show.hn and ask.hn are valid: No, Hondorus uses the *.[com|net|org|edu|...].hn format [1]

Edit: Ignore that second part. It's wrong. You can register .hn and someone did that for show.hn and ask.hn. You can have ask.hn for $10k [2]. Didn't do thorough enough research earlier because I was on my phone and my fingers are fat and the touchscreen buttons small.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hn

[2] http://www.sedo.com/search/details.php4?language=us&doma...

Some registries seem to be fairly lenient though, formally domains can't be registered at the second level of .au (must be .com.au or .org.au), yet somehow http://csiro.au/ exists.

Its often the case that these domains were registered by organisations (like, I assume, CSIRO) that had an early internet presence which pre-dates the formal procedures that were later adopted by registrars.

They predate even whois apparently. The web based auDA whois returns absolutely no data too.

    $ whois csiro.au
    No Data Found

Also strange things like .britishlibrary.uk in the early days no one quite knew how naming was going to pan out.

Looks like a useful TLD for some kind of websites

How chauvinist is this reply. I would not have thought to see such a thing on HN.

I don't see how it's chauvinist to suggest that a "country" with no human inhabitants except for foreign military personnel doesn't need its own ccTLD.

So when I remove you forcibly from your land (which the inhabitants were by the British government), then I steal your land and later I declare there is "no general population" so you have no right to a TLD either, it is not chauvinist when I declare you non existent? Because you were native and could not defend yourself against a modern army?

"On 11 May 2006, the High Court ruled that a 2004 Order in Council preventing the Chagossians' resettlement of the islands was unlawful, and consequently that the Chagossians were entitled to return to the outer islands of the Chagos Archipelago. [...] According to a WikiLeaks disclosure document, in a calculated move in 2009 to prevent re-settlement of the BIOT by native Chagossians, the UK proposed that the BIOT become a "marine reserve" with the aim of preventing the former inhabitants from returning to their lands. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

that's because it isn't.

It is. Removing natives, stealing their land, then declaring there is no population so you also get their TLD is chauvinist.

Yes, we should all stick to using .com at $50 per year per domain, and we all should be using Network Solutions because they're the original provider of it.

  | This is a hack, and I don't like it.

Registrations spilling over into other namespaces (in this case the ccTLD namespaces) are an effect of the common namespaces (.org, .com, .net) becoming crowded by legitimate companies and people squatting on domains hoping for a huge payout. People don't want to type in sanford-and-sons-incorporated.com (or was it sanford-and-sons-inc.com or maybe sanford-sons.com?).

A legitimate use-case (that doesn't run under 'only for use in association with said country') is for allowing user-defined webpages on sub-domains, while not enabling access to cookies for the master domain (e.g. Github moving Pages to github.io vs github.com).

This site is called "Hacker News". Hack doesn't mean 'dirty', it means glorious, better-than-intended, revising-and-improving. And to be sure, the nonsense system that required me to slap '.com' on the end of everything, needed revising.

There are some great hacks (most are) like unix dot files, don't you think there are some dirty hacks? Like a NAT? And god forbid, i didn't want people to tell they should stop hacking. I just think worse is not always better.

IMO this means more hacking is necessary. The hierarchy with dots becomes unpleasant.

Duct tape is great, but you can't have duct tape all the way down.

Since when is "you're doing it differently than the designers intended" a valid defense of anything?

edit: not to mention that the countries/territories in question very often market their domains that way themselves.

The problem is that the entire TLD taxonomy is a hack. They have one level, at most two, to squash a complex hierarchy of abstractions into, and there's going to inevitably be a lot of leakage.

But I'm not sure it hugely matters. It's like naming your company a made up word - Pepsi, Google, Nike, Jeep - people remember it anyway if it gains some significance to them.

I expect eventually the same thing will happen with internet domains to some extent, whether it's goodyear.com or mydistributedsocialnetwork.bit, as new generations get used .com as just another TLD, rather than the TLD.

Google is not a made up word. Nor is Nike.

Actually, "Google" is a misspelling of "googol", which, if I was told aright, was in fact made up by a child.

Ah, a greek goddess, didn't realize that. You get the general point though, I'm sure.

I think you're missing the point in defending the current status. Nobody is "misusing the DNS" when they're searching for something and don't find the most relevant examples on the first page because of shortcomings in Google's categorization.

Search users shouldn't "just deal with" substandard search results because of geographic hacks chosen by webmasters, and we certainly shouldn't accept search providers' shortcomings on something as palpably obvious and relatively easy to fix as genericizing an obviously-generic TLD for ranking purposes.

Slightly ignorant question: What is the technical argument against getting rid of any form of syntax for domains and simply allowing any ASCII string? Or even any UTF-8 string?

> this is a dirty hack

I disagree.

This is people starting businesses within a reasonable budget. I assume you've tried to purchase a reasonable domain name in the gTLD space. If so, you already know that a name like "filepicker.com" or "forecast.com" is going to cost you in the tens of thousands USD.

I have personally worked for companies where we paid upwards of $200K for a nice, short gTLD domain name. Unless you've got money to burn from the A-list of SV VCs, your startup simply can't afford it.

I find it grating too. I thought this was an interesting point:

"Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) don’t target specific countries. If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com, .org, or any of the domains listed below"

I actually consider .com etc to be largely US based, particular as it appears they can be seized by the US government and are under US jurisdiction.

> You are all misusing (or absuing) the DNS

It's only misusing or abusing if the entity in charge of the ccTLD deems it so. It does not appear that the owner of .io has any such restrictions.

There is no over-arching requirement that you must live in or target the nation that a ccTLD is assigned to.

Completely agree but the same can be said the other gTLDs. The actual problem people are mad at is the lack of spec-appropriate domain names and TLDs

In defense of the Internet: why are Internet locations tied to geographic locations? It seems silly and mostly used for i18n purposes.

It will be interesting to see how google regulates these when there are all sorts of gLTDs up for grabs.

Damn Kids! Get off my TLD Lawn!

"This is a hack, and I don't like it."

You are on Hacker News. :)

You are all misusing (or absuing) the DNS. Do you live in (or target) the British Indian Ocean Territory? No? Then this domain is not meant for you.

Meant or not meant, my best domains are with .me.

Google can probably give webmasters the option of using any domain for that country or globally.

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