Comment by crazygringo
14 hours ago
Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be US-specific if not obviously global, just like anything ".co.uk" should be assumed to be UK-specific if not obviously global.
If you use a .com for something that is specific to a country/region that is not the US, the onus is on you to clarify. That's the problem here. If you're not going to make it ".uk", then you should be making that obvious on the homepage.
Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be a commercial entity.
If you are from the US, the only nation who doesn't frequently use a national TLD, the onus is on you to judge if a site is commercial, US-specific, global, or something else entirely.
I mean... I don't disagree that there is an onus on any website to make it clear who it's audience is. But .com hasn't been exclusively US centric for literally decades. Even during peak 90s domain name territorialism .com meant "commercial".
People outside the USA, i.e. the majority of the world, often experience the opposite to what you've described: the tiresome implicit assumption that everything on the internet is US-related by default. It's not.