Comment by ocdtrekkie
7 hours ago
.us was primarily a hierarchy structure which in practice made confusing and hard to remember domain names, whereas .gov addresses hand out single domains which are generally easy to remember.
7 hours ago
.us was primarily a hierarchy structure which in practice made confusing and hard to remember domain names, whereas .gov addresses hand out single domains which are generally easy to remember.
Personally, I never saw anything confusing about city.state.us; the hierarchy was organized perfectly logically in the 3-tier jurisdictional structure that every American schoolboy knows by 3rd grade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us
But your point about them being rather longer and difficult to remember stands, and the same for a .gov, which could be shorter and catchier.
However amusingly, .us opened up second-level registrations 24 years ago, which means that any qualifying entity could have their name registered directly under .us, which is obviously recognizable, and also one character shorter, than a .gov registration. However, by that time, I believe that .gov had increased in stature so that registering governmental entities under .gov carried more certainty of conveying official status than anything under .us.
Also sadly, QR Codes and URL shorteners today sort of obviate the need to directly register the shortest possible domain name. I don't know: I was always kind of fond of the .us hierarchy, and I'm just personally sad that it's fading away.
> city.state.us
In reality, it wasn't that simple, and a lot of those .us domains looked like line noise.
Government sites are used to distribute public information. They need something they can print on a poster/sign. Not some bogus 'logical' hierarchy.
City/state/US is logical, the problem is most other hierarchies confuse people. For instance k12 subdomains for schools couldn't use that nomenclature because school districts do not map cleanly to towns. And that's before you talk about fire departments, townships, libraries, park districts, and countless other governmental bodies and districts which have overlapping boundaries of their own.
.gov certainly cares a level of exclusionary access that isn't really true of .us. Only one entity, the US federal government, can decide to hand someone a .gov address. And generally there is few signals harder to fake or impersonate than one.