6 ms·

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

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?

RHSeeger 7y ago
Personally, I still see it as a misuse. Those TLDs stand for countries and it doesn't feel right to me to use them for generic TLDs.
- souterrain 7y ago
  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.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- bauerd 7y ago
  Are there any negative consequences to this "misuse"?
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    CCTLDs are useful for searching. 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/ 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". ² https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#generic-domains https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#generic-...
    - numpad0 7y ago
      Why not just lang:ja
      - seszett 7y ago
        It works for Japan I guess, but it's often more important (well, to me at least) to discriminate by country than by language.
      - Symbiote 7y ago
        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.
      - kzrdude 7y ago
        Does this work? Seems to work in some searches and in some others it treats "lang" as a search term instead.
  - agwa 7y ago
    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.
    - marvin 7y ago
      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.
      - agwa 7y ago
        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. And .io is certainly worse than .org will ever be - there have been numerous security outages of the .io name servers and one very bad security incident: https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all-io-domains-with-a-targeted-registration/index.html https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    You can lose your domain based on politics of operating country. https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/letter-ly-abrupt-ly-loses-domain-name-as-a-result-of-the-war-in-libya/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/letter-ly-abrupt-ly-loses-...
- netsharc 7y ago
  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.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    US got the cool TLDs as reward for leading development of the Internet.
  - dwild 7y ago
    gtld != cctld One if generic, the other is country specific. .com and .net are both gtld, thus good for the whole world. .co.uk, .us and .io anre cctld, thus country specific. Segregating TLD makes sense, they are meant to understood what's behind the website.
    - desas 7y ago
      Sorry for being a technical pedant but .uk is a ccltd, there are alternatives to .co.uk like .nhs.uk .gov.uk etc
      - Meph504 7y ago
        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.
    - Meph504 7y ago
      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.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Those "countries" (vague term) have sovereignty over their TLD, to hand out names as they see fit.
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
In one sense words mean what their users intend them to mean. If people start using TLDs in a sense that differs from the original intent, are these people necessarily wrong? I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other. Although, perhaps, I'd be willing to say: who am I to tell others they're wrong?

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?

RHSeeger 7y ago

Personally, I still see it as a misuse. Those TLDs stand for countries and it doesn't feel right to me to use them for generic TLDs.

souterrain 7y ago
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.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bauerd 7y ago
Are there any negative consequences to this "misuse"?
- Symbiote 7y ago
  CCTLDs are useful for searching. 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/ 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". ² https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#generic-domains https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#generic-...
  - numpad0 7y ago
    Why not just lang:ja
    - seszett 7y ago
      It works for Japan I guess, but it's often more important (well, to me at least) to discriminate by country than by language.
    - Symbiote 7y ago
      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.
    - kzrdude 7y ago
      Does this work? Seems to work in some searches and in some others it treats "lang" as a search term instead.
- agwa 7y ago
  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.
  - marvin 7y ago
    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.
    - agwa 7y ago
      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. And .io is certainly worse than .org will ever be - there have been numerous security outages of the .io name servers and one very bad security incident: https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all-io-domains-with-a-targeted-registration/index.html https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...
- bdcravens 7y ago
  You can lose your domain based on politics of operating country. https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/letter-ly-abrupt-ly-loses-domain-name-as-a-result-of-the-war-in-libya/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/letter-ly-abrupt-ly-loses-...
netsharc 7y ago
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.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  US got the cool TLDs as reward for leading development of the Internet.
- dwild 7y ago
  gtld != cctld One if generic, the other is country specific. .com and .net are both gtld, thus good for the whole world. .co.uk, .us and .io anre cctld, thus country specific. Segregating TLD makes sense, they are meant to understood what's behind the website.
  - desas 7y ago
    Sorry for being a technical pedant but .uk is a ccltd, there are alternatives to .co.uk like .nhs.uk .gov.uk etc
    - Meph504 7y ago
      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.
  - Meph504 7y ago
    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.
lonelappde 7y ago
Those "countries" (vague term) have sovereignty over their TLD, to hand out names as they see fit.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago

In one sense words mean what their users intend them to mean. If people start using TLDs in a sense that differs from the original intent, are these people necessarily wrong? I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other. Although, perhaps, I'd be willing to say: who am I to tell others they're wrong?