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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

I wish US-specific (or any country-specific) sites weren't allowed to use .com. There's a perfectly good .us TLD going almost unused, and as an international user it's very frustrating to find a shop I want to buy from on a .com, and then discover that it only sells to the US.

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Yeah, beacause what we need is for government bureaucrats to make more rules, particularly regarding anything relating to the Internet.

I'll phone my representative, maybe he can sneak this in as a rider to a 2,000 page bill about abortion or gay marriage or funding the terrorists in Syria that nobody read.

.us is great, I too am surprised at how little I see it in use. Aside form the more restrictive application process, I think it partly stems from the fact .us came after .com and also initially a lot of users had confusion about TLDs (the type of people who would recite addresses like "h-t-t-p-colon-forward-slash-forward-slash-w-w-w-dot-example-dot-com" instead of just "example dot com"). Rightly or wrongly a lot of companies played it safe and went for .com.

On a related note, I have always disliked the fact that UK TLD disallows use of .uk, instead lumped with the crappy .co.uk.

> I have always disliked the fact that UK TLD disallows use of .uk,

Nominet have already floated the idea of opening up .UK for top level registration [1]. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they try and milk the market for topical 2LDs either.

I actually think it's a bad idea. Keeping a ccTLDs level reserved seems sensible to me. For instance, only UK Limited companies are allowed to register .ltd.uk domains.

[1] http://www.nominet.org.uk/how-participate/policy-development...

The idea to use the top level was rejected, thankfully. I like the way the domains are categorised, so you can tell when something is a school, government, etc. It gives domains a certain level of assurance and authority.

> The idea to use the top level was rejected, thankfully.

It's still on their homepage (pink "Consultation" box) and the wording is "revised proposals". Worryingly they're also looking at introducing residency checks for individual registrations.

One think doesn't prevent the other; our governmental sites are still .gov.pt, even though .pt is open for registration.

It's just a matter of reserving those domains.

As icebraining says, there is no reason for the 2 to be mutually exclusive.

I would mind less if there was more universal consistency, for example in France you have lemonde.fr, in Germany you have spiegel.de, in the UK you have independent.co.uk, Japan is japantimes.co.jp.

when MPs staff tell people their email address, they almost always have to say it two or three times before people believe them - the domain is simply parliament.uk (similarly, nhs.uk ).

I've always found this very much to be a US a problem. Most shops from Oslo to Hong Kong will gladly ship to anywhere on the planet, at most you have to inquire about the shipping costs.

I have no idea why Americans are so phobic about shipping abroad. It can't be a service issue, on that front one would expect exactly the opposite.

Not sure, but it may be a legal issue. Some things that are legal in the US aren't in Europe. Some product contain materials that aren't legal in Europe.

Wwhat makes you say the guardian is UK-specific?

they had two domain names that they seem to put together under a single one. That seems to be a logical move.

http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-us-grow...

The latest big news was about Snowden, hardly qualifies as a uk news ;)

Quite the opposite. I wish non-US companies were disallowed from using .com.

All American businesses use .com. Some non-American businesses do too, but it's first and foremost the "business" TLD for American businesses, just as .gov is used by the American government, and .org is loosely used for many types of American organizations.

In hindsight, doing .us.co or .us.com would have made a lot of sense. But hindsight is 20/20, and that's simply not what happened.

The UK has a similar privilege with postage stamps. They were the first to use stamps, and because of that they don't need to put the name of their country on their stamps:

"... on May 6, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use.

The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was in effect initially a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924."

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

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