Comment by crazygringo
1 month ago
> I do not assume that some `.com` website is American.
If it's clearly local to somewhere (news, shopping, etc.) as opposed to global or a webapp or something, and doesn't say it's specific to any other country, then yes people generally assume it's American.
Because when sites are intended for audiences in other countries, they usually use a country-specific TLD. Which, for historical reasons, never became a convention in the US since it's where the Internet was invented.
If you haven't noticed that this is a clear pattern, I don't know what to tell you.
If it is a business, people expect the .com is the global/international/headquarters address, not an us specific one per se. Some will have other country codes mostly to avoid phishing but some only redirect it to a subpath on the com website to handle regionalities/languages.
Random examples of foreign brands/companys in completely different industries: https://www.nestle.com is the "global" address of Nestle, a Swiss company. Mitsubushi, a japanes company uses https://www.mitsubishi.com with a /ja subpath to handle japanese language. The FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association which was founded in Paris, France and is know headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, uses fifa.com as its main domain despite having several regional office accross the globe but none in the US.