8 ms·

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and

by bonyt 7y ago

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego. > Yes, you read that right: houston.gov, losangeles.gov, newyorkcity.gov, and philadelphia.gov are all still available. As is the .gov for San Jose, Calif., the economic, cultural and political center of Silicon Valley. A minor nit: Many of these cities do have a .gov domain. For example, NYC has nyc.gov. So, I would suspect (or I’d hope) the GSA wouldn’t issue newyorkcity.gov to a random fraudster as easily. Houston has houstontx.gov. Philadelphia has phila.gov. San Jose has sanjoseca.gov. LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected. Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov.

profmonocle 7y ago
> Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov. This reminds me of how longwinded the domain hierarchy for .us originally was. In MN (not sure if it's the same for every state), city domains were "www.ci.cityname.mn.us". Then the school district's web site was "www.cityname.k12.mn.us". Not only was the order inconsistent (why not www.k12.cityname etc.?) but sometimes the city might be typed differently - i.e. the main Minneapolis site had "minneapolis" in the domain, but the school district had "mpls". In the primordial days of the web, back before good search engines, this didn't make it very easy to find the school's web site. Fortunately many governments realized this and moved once .gov became available to cities & states. (or they just used .org). For instance Minneapolis uses minneapolismn.gov, but many are still on the old style domains. The school district uses mpls.k12.mn.us, but at least they've dropped the "www."
- markovbot 7y ago
  those are called .us locality domains. ci.<locality name>.<state>.us is assigned to the city, there are several other similarly non-obvious assignments, anyone is permitted to register one. I found this page that talks about it more: http://telecafe.org/smw/.US_Locality_Domains http://telecafe.org/smw/.US_Locality_Domains
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  In Norway, people employed by the local municipalities have email adresses that are literally of the style $firstname[.$middlename].$lastname@employee.$municipalityName.municipality.no where "employee" and "municipality" are literal strings (in Norwegian) and the others are variables. It's incredible, I've seen people with 50 character long email addresses.
  - bewuethr 7y ago
    If you want to reschedule your Canadian citizenship ceremony, this is the address to email: RCC.DNCitSCRScheduling-ConvocationSCRCitRN.IRCC@cic.gc.ca
    - mikepurvis 7y ago
      Looks like part of that might be attempting to craft a bilingual email address? This kind of thing is tough to get right— in many cases the easiest thing is to just make up a word that's understandable in both languages but isn't obviously preferential to either, like how the transit agency in Ottawa is called "OC Transpo". On the other hand, for email addresses in particular, it should be easy to just have one in each language, which also makes sense in terms of the person replying knowing upfront which language you'd like to use based on which address your query came in on.
      - rapunkill 7y ago
        They could/should just use an alias where both email address point to the same inbox and would solve that issue in 2 minutes.
        scrollaway 7y ago
        Exactly. Belgium is trilingual and just makes aliases, even to domain names.
  - mijamo 7y ago
    Why is that incredible? It is pretty common for many institutions to have that kind of email. Universities for instance often have similar emails so that just by looking at the email you know if the person is a teacher / student / temp worker and which chair they belong to, sometimes which campus in addition. Many big companies have similar things to identify the BU of the email holder or indicate a contractor status (helpful for security policies).
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple. School districts may or may not be subordinate to city or county governments, and this may not be consistent state wide (of course, he heirarchy of city vs county may not be consistent statewide—looking at NYC.)
- zeckalpha 7y ago
  More confusingly, our legislature has used a Mongolian domain name. Looks like they (mostly) have redirects set up now: http://www.leg.mn http://www.leg.mn
- krallja 7y ago
  School districts are not always subsets of cities. Sometimes they even cross town, county, parish, or township lines.
hcs 7y ago
> LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected Vs lacounty.gov I guess?
- linux2647 7y ago
  vs lastate.gov aka Louisiana
- radium3d 7y ago
  or losangeles.ca.gov would be neat
  - pishpash 7y ago
    LA gov doesn't belong to CA gov, federalism, etc.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > LA gov doesn't belong to CA gov, federalism, etc. Federalism does not exist within states but between states and the federal government. Los Angeles (whether county or city) is an administrative subdivision of the State of California, not an separate sovereignty. OTOH, Los Angeles isn't getting a .ca.gov domain because the state government doesn't want to dilute it's brand with local government websites, but that's about branding, not Federalism.
      - zajio1am 7y ago
        While it is true that federalism is a wrong term, but there exists a general idea of independence of different levels of government. I am not sure about US constitutional arrangement, but in country where i live there there is clear and explicit concept that municipal, province and country (executive) governments are independent of each other, not subordinate. Therefore, it would be inappropriate for city to get a subdomain managed by higher-level government entity.
        7y ago
jrockway 7y ago
We have a TLD for NYC. It is, expectedly, not used for the city's official website. I guess people don't know how to visit TLDs in their browser. (I believe it would be "nyc.")
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. Here's an example of how it's used: https://thecity.nyc/ https://thecity.nyc/
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    > That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. While it is prohibited by the ICANN policy [1], it is not strictly enforced so that there are multiple TLDs with A/AAAA records. They traditionally could be resolved with a trailing dot (thus it is not a dotless host name, that would have no dot), but nowadays many browsers refuse to resolve them without an explicit scheme. But they do still exist: try `http://pn./` http://pn./` for example. [1] https://serverfault.com/a/907228 https://serverfault.com/a/907228
    - eru 7y ago
      HN doesn't like your link's formatting. Try: http://www.pn./ http://www.pn./ or http://www.pn/ http://www.pn/
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        This unintentionally makes a point about how hard these domains are to use; they're not supported very well.
        LukeShu 7y ago
        The problem is the closing ` is being treated as part of the URL.
krustyburger 7y ago
I would assume the LA City one was chosen because it’s still shorter than Los Angeles and it also differentiates from LA County. Much of the LA metropolitan area is within the county limits but not part of the city of LA.
- garmaine 7y ago
  I would think it also needs to differentiate from Louisiana.
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  yeah, the county website is likewise https://www.lacounty.gov/ https://www.lacounty.gov/
- Spare_account 7y ago
  The issue with lacity.org is the TLD, which creates confusion amongst the general public. Legitimate domains for government entities should ALL be on .gov, which should be rigorously controlled. Then I can tell my family to trust any .gov site, and assume that anything else is fraudulent. lacity.org undermines this.
  - teddyuk 7y ago
    Tell your family never to trust any site no matter the domain, sites are hacked too easily.
  - henvic 7y ago
    You'd be better off telling your family to distrust .gov sites by default.
- alfonsodev 7y ago
  Could be also because they have lots of Spanish speakers? La ciudad == the city, Spanglish la city, :)
cpeterso 7y ago
The city of Lafayette's police department (in the SF East Bay) accepts crime tip emails using a Gmail address (94549TIP@gmail.com). It's plastered on all their police cars, even though the city and police department have an official domain. Though even that is a .org domain, lovelafayette.org.
- mike_hock 7y ago
  So an email address that looks like a fraud (or just random) and a domain name that looks like a porn site.
  - Tempest1981 7y ago
    94549 is their city zip code. And a palindrome.
    - maxmalysh 7y ago
      > And a palindrome. spilled my coffee
    - Cerium 7y ago
      Yep, growing up in Lafayette the teachers always said, no reason not to remember, you only need to learn three digits.
- paggle 7y ago
  Well presumably one would not be feeling much “Love Lafayette” when reporting crimes.
  - manderley 7y ago
    ... but they would want to get the government, the "gman" involved - so "gmail" fits perfectly!
goodcanadian 7y ago
Just because the cities have .gov domains does not counter the fact that the other, very official looking, domains are unused and potentially available.
- machello13 7y ago
  Sure, but the sentence: > A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego. Is factually wrong.
vharuck 7y ago
My township (step below city) has a .com domain.
- jcora 7y ago
  Is moldbug your mayor/ceo?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
madcaptenor 7y ago
Perhaps Los Angeles and Louisiana have a truce where neither one takes la.gov
rolltiide 7y ago
> LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected. It needs disambiguation because of Louisiana, while "Los Angeles" is more heavily in the collective conscious

by bonyt 7y ago

profmonocle 7y ago

> Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov. This reminds me of how longwinded the domain hierarchy for .us originally was. In MN (not sure if it's the same for every state), city domains were "www.ci.cityname.mn.us". Then the school district's web site was "www.cityname.k12.mn.us". Not only was the order inconsistent (why not www.k12.cityname etc.?) but sometimes the city might be typed differently - i.e. the main Minneapolis site had "minneapolis" in the domain, but the school district had "mpls". In the primordial days of the web, back before good search engines, this didn't make it very easy to find the school's web site. Fortunately many governments realized this and moved once .gov became available to cities & states. (or they just used .org). For instance Minneapolis uses minneapolismn.gov, but many are still on the old style domains. The school district uses mpls.k12.mn.us, but at least they've dropped the "www."

markovbot 7y ago
those are called .us locality domains. ci.<locality name>.<state>.us is assigned to the city, there are several other similarly non-obvious assignments, anyone is permitted to register one. I found this page that talks about it more: http://telecafe.org/smw/.US_Locality_Domains http://telecafe.org/smw/.US_Locality_Domains
semi-extrinsic 7y ago
In Norway, people employed by the local municipalities have email adresses that are literally of the style $firstname[.$middlename].$lastname@employee.$municipalityName.municipality.no where "employee" and "municipality" are literal strings (in Norwegian) and the others are variables. It's incredible, I've seen people with 50 character long email addresses.
- bewuethr 7y ago
  If you want to reschedule your Canadian citizenship ceremony, this is the address to email: RCC.DNCitSCRScheduling-ConvocationSCRCitRN.IRCC@cic.gc.ca
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    Looks like part of that might be attempting to craft a bilingual email address? This kind of thing is tough to get right— in many cases the easiest thing is to just make up a word that's understandable in both languages but isn't obviously preferential to either, like how the transit agency in Ottawa is called "OC Transpo". On the other hand, for email addresses in particular, it should be easy to just have one in each language, which also makes sense in terms of the person replying knowing upfront which language you'd like to use based on which address your query came in on.
    - rapunkill 7y ago
      They could/should just use an alias where both email address point to the same inbox and would solve that issue in 2 minutes.
      - scrollaway 7y ago
        Exactly. Belgium is trilingual and just makes aliases, even to domain names.
- mijamo 7y ago
  Why is that incredible? It is pretty common for many institutions to have that kind of email. Universities for instance often have similar emails so that just by looking at the email you know if the person is a teacher / student / temp worker and which chair they belong to, sometimes which campus in addition. Many big companies have similar things to identify the BU of the email holder or indicate a contractor status (helpful for security policies).
jimktrains2 7y ago
School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple. School districts may or may not be subordinate to city or county governments, and this may not be consistent state wide (of course, he heirarchy of city vs county may not be consistent statewide—looking at NYC.)
zeckalpha 7y ago
More confusingly, our legislature has used a Mongolian domain name. Looks like they (mostly) have redirects set up now: http://www.leg.mn http://www.leg.mn
krallja 7y ago
School districts are not always subsets of cities. Sometimes they even cross town, county, parish, or township lines.

hcs 7y ago

> LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected Vs lacounty.gov I guess?

linux2647 7y ago
vs lastate.gov aka Louisiana
radium3d 7y ago
or losangeles.ca.gov would be neat
- pishpash 7y ago
  LA gov doesn't belong to CA gov, federalism, etc.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > LA gov doesn't belong to CA gov, federalism, etc. Federalism does not exist within states but between states and the federal government. Los Angeles (whether county or city) is an administrative subdivision of the State of California, not an separate sovereignty. OTOH, Los Angeles isn't getting a .ca.gov domain because the state government doesn't want to dilute it's brand with local government websites, but that's about branding, not Federalism.
    - zajio1am 7y ago
      While it is true that federalism is a wrong term, but there exists a general idea of independence of different levels of government. I am not sure about US constitutional arrangement, but in country where i live there there is clear and explicit concept that municipal, province and country (executive) governments are independent of each other, not subordinate. Therefore, it would be inappropriate for city to get a subdomain managed by higher-level government entity.
      - 7y ago

jrockway 7y ago

We have a TLD for NYC. It is, expectedly, not used for the city's official website. I guess people don't know how to visit TLDs in their browser. (I believe it would be "nyc.")

CydeWeys 7y ago
That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. Here's an example of how it's used: https://thecity.nyc/ https://thecity.nyc/
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  > That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. While it is prohibited by the ICANN policy [1], it is not strictly enforced so that there are multiple TLDs with A/AAAA records. They traditionally could be resolved with a trailing dot (thus it is not a dotless host name, that would have no dot), but nowadays many browsers refuse to resolve them without an explicit scheme. But they do still exist: try `http://pn./` http://pn./` for example. [1] https://serverfault.com/a/907228 https://serverfault.com/a/907228
  - eru 7y ago
    HN doesn't like your link's formatting. Try: http://www.pn./ http://www.pn./ or http://www.pn/ http://www.pn/
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      This unintentionally makes a point about how hard these domains are to use; they're not supported very well.
      - LukeShu 7y ago
        The problem is the closing ` is being treated as part of the URL.

krustyburger 7y ago

I would assume the LA City one was chosen because it’s still shorter than Los Angeles and it also differentiates from LA County. Much of the LA metropolitan area is within the county limits but not part of the city of LA.

garmaine 7y ago
I would think it also needs to differentiate from Louisiana.
tomjakubowski 7y ago
yeah, the county website is likewise https://www.lacounty.gov/ https://www.lacounty.gov/
Spare_account 7y ago
The issue with lacity.org is the TLD, which creates confusion amongst the general public. Legitimate domains for government entities should ALL be on .gov, which should be rigorously controlled. Then I can tell my family to trust any .gov site, and assume that anything else is fraudulent. lacity.org undermines this.
- teddyuk 7y ago
  Tell your family never to trust any site no matter the domain, sites are hacked too easily.
- henvic 7y ago
  You'd be better off telling your family to distrust .gov sites by default.
alfonsodev 7y ago
Could be also because they have lots of Spanish speakers? La ciudad == the city, Spanglish la city, :)

cpeterso 7y ago

The city of Lafayette's police department (in the SF East Bay) accepts crime tip emails using a Gmail address (94549TIP@gmail.com). It's plastered on all their police cars, even though the city and police department have an official domain. Though even that is a .org domain, lovelafayette.org.

mike_hock 7y ago
So an email address that looks like a fraud (or just random) and a domain name that looks like a porn site.
- Tempest1981 7y ago
  94549 is their city zip code. And a palindrome.
  - maxmalysh 7y ago
    > And a palindrome. spilled my coffee
  - Cerium 7y ago
    Yep, growing up in Lafayette the teachers always said, no reason not to remember, you only need to learn three digits.
paggle 7y ago
Well presumably one would not be feeling much “Love Lafayette” when reporting crimes.
- manderley 7y ago
  ... but they would want to get the government, the "gman" involved - so "gmail" fits perfectly!

goodcanadian 7y ago

Just because the cities have .gov domains does not counter the fact that the other, very official looking, domains are unused and potentially available.

machello13 7y ago
Sure, but the sentence: > A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego. Is factually wrong.

vharuck 7y ago

My township (step below city) has a .com domain.

jcora 7y ago
Is moldbug your mayor/ceo?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

madcaptenor 7y ago

Perhaps Los Angeles and Louisiana have a truce where neither one takes la.gov

rolltiide 7y ago

> LA has .. lacity.org? That’s a bit unexpected. It needs disambiguation because of Louisiana, while "Los Angeles" is more heavily in the collective conscious