21 ms·
What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing?
- junon 4y ago.SU is still the soviet union, if memory serves. Those sites are still in operation.
- winrid 4y agoNot sure why you're downvoted. This seems correct, and interesting.
- loeg 4y agoIt’s the very first example in the article.
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoSo a nice hook to read the article for those of us reading the comments first.
- pascalxus 4y agoHacker news commentations are usually more interesting and insightful than you're average article on the internet that garners enough SEO to be posted here. So, let's not pretend otherwise. Many of us, just read the comments here and only read the article if it has earned our attention.
- layer8 4y agoI’m just now noticing that, quite fittingly for the time, .SU is .US reversed.
- hoseja 4y agoAnd they mean pretty much the same thing.
- sonicggg 4y agoThe article does not explain why .su seems to be popular among white supremacy sites.
- Liquid_Fire 4y agoIt does mention a possible reason: > to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else
- jasonjei 4y agoAn interesting question the article doesn’t address is the current state and fate of *.hk
- xmprt 4y agoSeems like the answer is that there is no answer. Everything is done on a case by case basis. The outcome of the *.hk TLD is probably the least of the Hong Kong people's concerns right now and if China have control over Hong Kong then it'll probably have control over the TLD as well. Also, there's this: > Based on my (admittedly cursory) scan of the Taiwan one, there’s a lot of mention about “the territory of the Governmental Authority,” which implies that if the Governmental Authority no longer has territory, things might become somewhat hairy.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago> if China have control over Hong Kong It's Chinese territory. They have 100% control.
- swores 4y agoSometimes "if" means "so long as it's true" rather than "I'm not sure whether it's true".
- bin_bash 4y agoConsidering how it acknowledges Taiwan I think we can safely attribute that to oversight rather than malice.
- astralbijection 4y agoYeah, that was oversight. I typed up this thing in the span of a few hours and I was so caught up with the fall of the Soviet Union that I had forgotten about Hong Kong.
- wildzzz 4y agoMacau also had its own TLD (.mo) prior to the handover just like Hong Kong so I don't see why China would all of a sudden decide to prohibit the use of either (maybe when the 50 years are up!) There's no TLD for the other SARs but that's because they were never independent.
- aussiedude 4y agoAustralia has its .au TLD plus .cc and .cx. It’s pretty hard to see what benefit these TLDs have to these Australian external territories and if ICANN should even allow them to exist.
- cozzyd 4y ago.cx has ...interesting... internet historical considerations though. But, for example, .gl and .fo also exist despite being part of Denmark (yes, it's complicated). Presumably those Australian territories have some level of jurisdiction over their telecommunications.
- SllX 4y agoAt this point the reason to allow them is because they already did and they shouldn’t break links unnecessarily. I guess another reason is because they allow nonsense like .google now so what’s the actual harm in a country having two or three?
- smegger001 4y agoin practice does anyone actually use the generic tld's? i know many big companies splurged large amounts of money on them but i never see any of them.
- ExtraE 4y agoThere’s domains.google
- jhugo 4y agoGoogle uses theirs (.google, .goog, .gle, .youtube) both for public and infrastructure stuff. Same with AWS (.aws). For things like `pki.goog` or `ecr.aws` I think it makes a lot of sense; compared to an equivalent .com domain it removes the Verisign dependency from the DNS resolution chain.
- CydeWeys 4y agoI see usages of .app and .dev domains posted nearly every day on HN. People are definitely using them.
- pluc 4y agoA similar situation happened with Canada's third-level domains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.qc.ca#Third-level_(provincial)_and_fourth-level_(municipal)_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.qc.ca#Third-level_(provincial...
- donmcronald 4y agoAFAIK no one lost their domains when that happened. IIRC there was even an opportunity to move from a third level domain to a matching second level domain. That’s a lot different than having a TLD disappear along with all the domains.
- pluc 4y agoI don't see any of those domains today so I assume they were asked to migrate somehow?
- donmcronald 4y agoI think a lot migrated to second level domains. I don’t remember exactly how it worked, but third level domain owners got the first chance at the matching second level domains. There are still some on third level domains, but mostly to avoid collisions I think.
- srmarm 4y agoDidn't the US have a domain format like this, I seem to remember it being cited as a reason that .com became the default for US businesses.
- wirthjason 4y agoCurious what would happen to trendy names like “.io”. Most names are country specific, e.g. I can’t imagine people outside of Japan wanting “.jp” domain, others can transcend the country.
- my69thaccount 4y agoSee https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/trouble-in-clever-domain-land-bit-ly-and-others-risk-losing-theirs-swift-ly/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/trouble-in-clever-domain-l...
- arinlen 4y agoI'm not sure you read the article, as all that journalism points out hackernews as the source.
- my69thaccount 4y agoIt was 12 years ago and presumably GP hasn't read it...
- kijeda 4y agoICANN is finalizing a policy that will govern this question. In short, if adopted, 5-10 years after the country is removed from the ISO 3166-1 standard it will be removed as a TLD. https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/ccnso-proposed-policy-on-the-retirement-of-cctlds-22-11-2021-en https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/ccnso-propose...
- donmcronald 4y ago> There is a good faith obligation to ensure an orderly shutdown of the retiring ccTLD which takes into consideration the interests of its registrants and the stability and security of the DNS. > The Manager of the ccTLD should be notified (Notice of Removal) that the ccTLD shall be removed from the Root Zone five years from the date of the notice. ICANN’s lack of perspective is stunning. If I own a domain on any TLD my interest as a registrant is having that TLD around forever. I’m one of the few that thinks the new TLDs are an amazing opportunity for people to build brands and identities. I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN. ICANN is one of the most important institutions around, so it’s sad to see them working so hard for themselves and the registries while making registrars and registrants a secondary consideration (IMO).
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoDo you trust your country to continue existing? I do.
- post-it 4y agoYeah, if .ca disappears it means I probably have a bigger problem.
- donmcronald 4y agoI think .ca is one of the safer TLDs if you’re Canadian.
- zarzavat 4y ago
- bmurray7jhu 4y agoWhen the Netherlands Antilles was disolved in 2010, the .an TLD was phased out.
- lightlyused 4y agoWas it replaced by a TLD for the individual islands?
- layer8 4y agoYes, by .BQ, .CW, and .SX: https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/archive/pdf/en/iso_3166-1_newsletter_vi-8_split_of_the_dutch_antilles_final-en.pdf https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/archive/pd...
- FabianBeiner 4y agoI remember trying to get an .an domain, but it was never possible. I think you needed an address there or something like that. (I was going for fabi.an)
- droidist2 4y agoWhy not just keep it? Most TLDs aren't even linked to a country, so if a country stops existing it would just become another TLD not linked to a country.
- judge2020 4y agoSomeone has to assume ownership over the TLD, since ICANN’s halfway-official stance is that the country itself owns the TLD and ICANN simply acknowledges its existence. On top of that, unless it’s contracted out, the TLD registry operator is the country, so actual servers and operations would need to be taken over by another registry operator (I’m sure Google would be happy to do it).
- astralbijection 4y agoAdding onto that, from my understanding of the political situation, China has been repeatedly affirming that the country of Taiwan is not a country, but is actually a rogue province and fully part of China. If China were to take over Taiwan, then getting rid of the .tw domain would be one of the many symbolic ways it would strip Taiwan of its status as a sovereign nation, not to mention all the other material ways they would do so. It would probably not be immediate, because in the past, the process of removing domains has involved transition periods (i.e. moving from .yu to .me and .rs).
- eloisius 4y agoLinking a TLD's fate to ISO-3166 is already perilous for Taiwan. According to that standard, Taiwan's name is "Taiwan (Province of China)"[1]. Seems odd for one province to have it's own country-level record, while other provinces of China do not, but we all countenance the absurdity because China gonna China. [1]: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:TW https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:TW
- seszett 4y agoFor some reason, almost all of French overseas départements and territories have ccTLDs even though they're not really used (sometimes by local administration or for locally relevant websites, but regular people just use .fr). They can be used by any French or EU citizen since they are in effect just additional ccTLDs of France. There are 12 of them I think, while the 97 other départements don't have their own ccTLD. I have no idea how this situation happened since most of these places were never countries at all or anything remotely close to it (New Caledonia and French Polynesia are the two that do make sense). It's a bit weird but it shows that Taiwan's situation isn't that special regarding TLDs.
- cowpig 4y ago> because of this grayness and lax and outdated terms of use, it’s host to lots of cool sites such as white supremacist site Daily Stormer (to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else), cybercrime activities, the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi up until 2019, the Dontesk People’s Republic, and more. cool sites?
- obert 4y agoYeah, even if sarcastic, not cool
- jhugo 4y agoIt's fairly obvious to me that it was sarcasm.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoThose two words are at the beginning of the quote. Maybe the author was looking for "eccentric" or "unusual"?
- rogers18445 4y agoIs there anything stopping Google from just making up their own TLDs for their browser?
- CydeWeys 4y agoName collisions. There are various fake crypto/blockchain-related fake TLDs you can add to your browser through browser extensions, but the risk of future name collisions is very real. And a domain name that doesn't even work in other browsers isn't useful at all. Having something as basic as "Share URL" not work results in a fundamentally broken (and bad) user experience.
- charcircuit 4y ago>Name collisions. This would not be a concern because Chrome has a massive install base. Similar to .onion, no one would register or potentially be able to register the one Google would adopt.
- arccy 4y ago.onion now has rfc backing https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7686 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7686
- srmarm 4y agoTechnically it would be simple, they'd just need to add a lookup to their database before doing regular DNS lookup. Back in the 90s AOL did similar with their browser and it was fairly common to see companies list their AOL Keyword in advertising. I think it's unlikely to happen too soon though as they generally own the search box in chrome and can autosuggest whatever they want when you enter a term anyway which is probably the contemporary equivalent anyway.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 4y agoI know someone who recently bought a new .af domain in cash from the Taliban, in person in Kabul. The ministry of communications which controls it accepts payment by depositing cash and getting a bank draft receipt in downtown Kabul. The previous government has definitely stopped existing, but this is the same process as before the August 2021 ghani government collapse. Once you have your bank draft you walk it over to a clerk at the ministry of communications and within a few days somebody will hand edit the .af root zonefile.
- arccy 4y agoit doesn't (or didn't) seem necessary to actually go over there for registrations? https://tld-list.com/tld/af https://tld-list.com/tld/af
- dwild 4y agoI just tried on a few: - Gandi : I get "Temporary error" - Regery : Seems to allow it but I don't know how much we can trust that. - OVH : I get "Unavailable" - Netim : "Registrations are currently not possible." I think it's fair to say that it's not that easy...
- sonicggg 4y agoThat's interesting. Why won't the Taliban just license it, like other places do? I don't need to go to Tuvalu to buy a .tv domain. I'm guessing embargoes may play a minor role, but China still trades with them.
- walrus01 4y agoEven before the government collapse the ministry of comms showed little interest in licensing it to a third party operator for widespread use. They get more revenue from a small customer prepaid credit loading tax on the four LTE/gsm/3gpp band mobile phone operators.
- incone123 4y agoMaybe they don't want people using it as an abbreviation for As Fuck. high.af
- rospaya 4y agoThere's a short documentary about the .yu domain and the women who administered it. https://vimeo.com/95833310 https://vimeo.com/95833310
- smcl 4y agoI was little confused why some countries were included but not others. So it's clear why in addition to .su (split up) you'd be interested in .dd (ceased to exist after German Reunification) .cs (split into two countries) and .yu (inherited then later renamed) But I was wondering why .pl was included but not .ro or .bg - after all Romania and Bulgaria were also in Warsaw Pact and had overthrown their USSR-backed communist governments. The reason is simple, apparently these ccTLDs just didn't exist before then - .ro was created in 1993 and .bg in 1995. Every day's a school day :)
- ogurechny 4y agoUntil recently, .SU had very little to with “Russian government”. Its Wikipedia article is a kitchen sink of useless facts which gave the post author the false sense he knows something about the topic. SU TLD was given to Soviet Unix Users Group when Demos/Relcom (mostly the same people forming SUUG, regarded as first internet provider in USSR) joined the EUNet. Some relevant discussion can probably be found in old Usenet posts. At the time, finding someone in Soviet — and, shortly afterwards, Russian — government who understood what a domain name was would be a miracle. Further Internet-related committees and legal entities would be formed in the '90s by people from that tech circle. I suppose the combination of personal contacts between people who created current Internet management organizations, inertia, long growth and transfer period of RU, and probably a convenience of making some money from yearly registration fees resulted in endless deprecated-but-active-in-all-regards state. It seems to me that making everyone using it move because of some formal decision would be as abrupt as making most of .com/.net/.org users move to specific country TLDs which they should formally use. Given how many crapTLDs have been created recently, its notability seems to dwindle.
- ogurechny 4y agoFun fact: IANA got 3 applications for RU TLD at the same time: one from Demos, one from Relcom, and one from Russian Academy of Sciences. It took 3 years for all participants to agree and form a non-commercial entity, RIPN, which finally got the domain.