Anyone remember the discussion years ago when a lot of people on the web (including the early github community and alike) stood up against the "misuse" of TLDs like .io and .tv?
Or, in the case of .io, a colony/possession/militarybase that has been depopulated of its people. (No, it is not the only place that has been depopulated in the name of colonialism.)
To randomly philosophize (probably as many have done), segregating TLDs to political units seemed like an arbitrary choice anyway, there are companies not in the US with ".com", or ".net", and why should foreigners have multiple dots like ".co.uk" and be denied ".com". Or in Germany everyone just uses $DOMAIN.de, so you can't tell if it's a government or commercial institution.
The only segregation that made a lot of sense was ".gov" and ".mil", so users could tell they were the real deal.
To me the only problem I have with the way they handled cctld, is the inconsistency which has let to a lot of confusion.
I think that cctld should be a sub off of the gltd. just take the gltds and append the country extension to them.
(so the UK for example would be .com.uk, .org.uk, etc..)
I don't know if it would be wiser (and necessary) to effectively leave the US with the gtld, or to try to transition all of them to a .us sub.
As it sites now, greed and stupidity have now pushed the number of gobal tlds to over a 1000, I would see that 99% of those should be removed, or them all fall back under the rules for the global tld issuance.
my point is about consistency of enforcement, not about the possibilities, instead of letting each ccltd make their own, they should come with the agreement of following the global tld standards is my point.
I fairly often add "site:dk" to my Google searches. I know I'm excluding Danish sites using generic TLDs, or using Danish domain hacks¹, but it's usually good enough to get past the irrelevant results I didn't want.
Search engines can also use the CCTLD as part of the signalling -- a .dk site is almost certainly related to Denmark.
That doesn't work for .to, .nu, .cc and so on. (.IO is unusual, the only genuinely linked site I can see is the government's, at https://biot.gov.io/ ) Google has a list of CCTLDs it considers "generic"², I don't know if they have workarounds for sites actually linked to these places.
¹ "A/S" is a type of company registration, so American Samoa ".as" is used, "nu" means "now" so there's some use of Niue ".nu".
I use it when I want a recipe using local (Danish/European) measures and ingredients, or restaurants in this city, or a relevant government or official website.
Many of these have an English version in Denmark, which I understand much more easily.
Not-Denmark-but-English results are most of what I'm trying to exclude -- recipes full of sugar with measurements in Fahren-cups, restaurants in the three Copenhagens in North America, etc.
Yeah, ccTLDs are often poorly run and domain names can be seized for arbitrary political reasons. In contrast, gTLDs are regulated by ICANN and are required to uphold technical and policy standards.
This statement sounds rather ironic in a discussion that involves a .org domain. Although I'm sure country-TLDs can in principle do things that are much worse.
They absolutely can. Just one example of how ICAAN regulation helps: ICAAN requires that the .org registry let domain owners lock in their current price for 10 years if a price increase is announced, and prohibits different renewal prices for different domains. ccTLDs can just increase prices with no notice, or price gouge popular domains.
