Comment by aussiedude
4 years ago
Australia has its .au TLD plus .cc and .cx.
It’s pretty hard to see what benefit these TLDs have to these Australian external territories and if ICANN should even allow them to exist.
4 years ago
Australia has its .au TLD plus .cc and .cx.
It’s pretty hard to see what benefit these TLDs have to these Australian external territories and if ICANN should even allow them to exist.
... and .hm and .nf.
The history on why some external territories are coded is because an international standard is the basis for the two-letters used for these TLDs, and that standard is used for other purposes. Far flung localities are often coded due to things like physical mail delivery or customs boundaries which utilize the same standard.
Why does .eu exist? Essentially because "eu" was coded for the European Union to facilitate "EUR" as a currency code when the Euro was introduced. ISO 4217 currency codes derive from ISO 3166 country codes.
At this point the reason to allow them is because they already did and they shouldn’t break links unnecessarily. I guess another reason is because they allow nonsense like .google now so what’s the actual harm in a country having two or three?
in practice does anyone actually use the generic tld's? i know many big companies splurged large amounts of money on them but i never see any of them.
Google uses theirs (.google, .goog, .gle, .youtube) both for public and infrastructure stuff. Same with AWS (.aws).
For things like `pki.goog` or `ecr.aws` I think it makes a lot of sense; compared to an equivalent .com domain it removes the Verisign dependency from the DNS resolution chain.
They are rarely seen, as many consumers don't identify them as domains. People understand the meaning of "example.com" in an ad or something. Thus companies are reluctant to put their primary site to not established TLDs.
Companies also always "need" the .com (and country, TLD) as people will always try companyname.com.
New TLDs work for some people's blogs, some places with more technical audience or specific marketing campaigns.
I see usages of .app and .dev domains posted nearly every day on HN. People are definitely using them.
There’s domains.google
.cx has ...interesting... internet historical considerations though.
But, for example, .gl and .fo also exist despite being part of Denmark (yes, it's complicated). Presumably those Australian territories have some level of jurisdiction over their telecommunications.
> It’s pretty hard to see what benefit these TLDs have to these Australian external territories and if ICANN should even allow them to exist.
Why should ICANN have a say? Isn't it enough that a country wishes to put in the work to manage their ccTLDs?
Originally a list of two letter country and territory codes was simply used. IIRC this was before ICANN was even constituted. I think it jon postel might simply have typed in the names.