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As always, these articles seem to be written from a US or "international" point of view that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least

• bux93 3y ago
  Also, it's not like gTLDs don't have weird policies. A ton of them are a money grab trying to extort money from trademark owners, and they might disappear or raise prices overnight. Com/net/org repeatedly tried shenanigans in the past. Replacing "do your due diligence" with a heuristic "cc = bad!" is not advisable.
  • nytesky 3y ago
    Why did com net org domains try in past, price gouging?
    • diggan 3y ago
      Two events that come to mind: - The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN, seen as testing the waters for doing the same with .com if the cap removal was successful, which it wasn't - PIR (operator of .org) was almost sold to some shell company which was gonna transform it into a for-profit from it's current non-profit, this was blocked by ICANN if I remember correctly Maybe there are more that I don't know about/don't remember
      • donmcronald 3y ago
        > The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN I thought those were removed for .org. Did this [1] get reversed? 1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/icann-eliminates-org-domain-price-caps-despite-lopsided-opposition/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/icann-eliminates...
      • NewJazz 3y ago
        >this was blocked by ICANN if I remember correctly ICANN executives were in on the play IIRC. They abandoned efforts once regulators started scrutinizing.
      • renewiltord 3y ago
        It was blocked by the California Attorney General threatening to investigate them. Essentially, historical accident of ICANN being a California-incorporated 501c3 rescued .org from the ICANN board.
    • cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      Why? Because they can?
• kome 3y ago
  yes, lol, he was missing the absolute elephant in the room. if your business operate in france or germany you better have and use the .fr or .de domain, or at least the .eu one. big brands do it (such amazon, google, apple) so do you.
  • Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    > big brands do it (such amazon, google, apple) so do you. A few counterpoints: - https://www.fnac.com/ https://www.fnac.com/ - https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/ https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/ - https://www.apple.com/nl/ https://www.apple.com/nl/
    • teddyh 3y ago
      Where the web site resides goes in waves; sometimes people diverge it out into multiple sites based on ccTLD, and sometimes they redirect all ccTLDs into one central site with sub-pages. But you can bet they will always be keeping the ccTLD domains registered. I.e. FNAC still owns fnac.nl, Apple still owns apple.nl and IKEA still owns ikea.nl, and if you go there you will be redirected to the correct web page.
      • fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
        >FNAC still owns fnac.nl [...] and if you go there you will be redirected to the correct web page. That doesn't seem correct >ping fnac.nl >Pinging fnac.nl [165.160.15.20] with 32 bytes of data: >Request timed out.
        • tephra 3y ago
          If you'd tried going to fnac.nl or say use curl for a http request you'd see that it is in fact correct. Ping does not a http request make as they said in the olden days.
          • fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
            I did try going to fnac.nl on my web browser and it does not load. And it still isn't loading for me while fnac.com does. Edit: it does load after some time on my web browser.
• Hamuko 3y ago
  >I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country. The people of Tuvalu would probably argue against this, since .tv income represents like 12.5% of the national domestic revenue. Taxation is around 15%. https://finance.gov.tv/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1st-Supplementary-Budget-2020.pdf https://finance.gov.tv/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1st-Supple...
  • James_K 3y ago
    You could always just donate some money to Tuvalu and use a better TLD.
  • tialaramex 3y ago
    It must necessarily be up to the country to decide what "ties to the country" even means anyway. It's important to the Irish Republic for example that everybody with connections to the island of Ireland counts as Irish, even though de facto a corner of their island is occupied by people who (to a lesser or greater extent) insist they're British and are no longer part of the EU unlike the Republic. That's how lots of British people have Irish EU passports, if they were born on the island or have strong connections to it, they're just as entitled to a passport as if they'd been born in Dublin, in the Republic. It was interesting to see in that budget that Tuvalu earns more from .tv than they do from operating an "Open Registry" (aka "Flag of Convenience") for foreign shipping companies, which is probably the most analogous arrangement to selling domains in your ccTLD from the past.
    • messe 3y ago
      This is a certainly a nitpick, and pet peeve, but the Irish Republic was a revolutionary state between roughly 1919-1922. The modern state is just known as Ireland, or referred to as the Republic of Ireland.
      • tialaramex 3y ago
        Fair, too late to correct now.
• James_K 3y ago
  > doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country. This is a very odd interpretation of an article which is essentially saying "don't buy ccTLDs unless you live there".
  • seszett 3y ago
    That aspect is only talked about at the very end almost as an aside, and the phrasing is "[some ccTLDs are] more likely to be ok [than other ccTLDs]", "it might be somewhat safer" and "gTLDs are at least lower risk than ccTLDs". This certainly suggests a different conclusion than "don't buy ccTLDs unless you live there". I would say the conclusion of this article is actually "don't buy ccTLDs except maybe in some cases that I won't even discuss since they seem so rare to me". I would say on the other hand that buying a domain with the ccTLD of the country you're operating in is a must, and especially so if you're operating in a few neighbouring countries.
    • James_K 3y ago
      > This certainly suggests a different conclusion than "don't buy ccTLDs unless you live there". From the article's conclusion: > Are ccTLDs Ever Useful? > I certainly don’t think it’s a good idea to register a domain under a ccTLD for “vanity” purposes: because it makes a word, is the same as a file extension you like, or because it looks cool. > Finally, it might be somewhat safer to register under a ccTLD if you live in the location involved. At least then you might have a better idea of whether your domain is likely to get pulled out from underneath you. Unfortunately, as the .eu example shows, living somewhere today is no guarantee you’ll still be living there tomorrow, even if you don’t move house. He makes the fair point that, even if they are intended for residents, it may not always be safe for them either.
      • dbalatero 3y ago
        Taking one example, a price hike from $25 -> $75/yr affects everyone, including residents.
• tiborsaas 3y ago
  > they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country That would have just opened the door to proxy-ownership. You register a domain under a company and they let you use it.
  • mananaysiempre 3y ago
    Which is absolutely something that happens with ccTLDs that impose that kind of policy today.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    That proxy ownership takes significantly more time and money than the domain itself. I think it would prevent "queer.af" situations quite well.
    • lobsterthief 3y ago
      “Significantly more time and money” just means bigger companies will have more of a monopoly on those domains, which is also not good.
      • jeroenhd 3y ago
        I don't think I've ever noticed a problem with this. The only difference I can find is that the "buy this domain for $4000" scammers have a different default language.
    • plagiarist 3y ago
      .af is so beautiful for vanity domains but only someone with a complete and total ignorance of multiple subjects would register one for serious use. Yeah, at least requiring a proxy you might have someone with enough knowledge to point out the mistake there.
      • trimethylpurine 3y ago
        Seems more like a statement than a mistake.
• sofixa 3y ago
  > I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country. That's already the case for plenty of ccTLDs. .eu, .it., .bg and I'm sure many others are only available to citizens or legal entities registered in that country.
• usrbinbash 3y ago
  > that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country. What something is intended for in some hypothetical, ideal setting, is a moot point given that the countries have full control over their ccTLD. That's the issue, and the author identifies it correctly.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• RHSeeger 3y ago
  > I certainly don’t think it’s a good idea to register a domain under a ccTLD for “vanity” purposes: because it makes a word, is the same as a file extension you like, or because it looks cool. Well, they're NOT vanity domains. They were created specifically for countries, to be owned by countries and controlled by countries. The fact that it happens to look neat to use that domain doesn't change that fact. When you start using such a domain, you should know full well that you are tying yourself to a resource that you could lose at any time, for any reason. Tying the health of your business to such a condition seems crazy to me.
  • dundarious 3y ago
    They said domain under a ccTLD, so they're clearly not talking about ccTLDs themselves as vanity domains.
    • RHSeeger 3y ago
      I was talking about the domains under ccTLDs. The domains <something>.<country code> aren't "vanity domains", they're for a country to control. The country may rent them out to be used as a vanity domain, but the country has absolute and total control over them. So using them as a vanity domain that your business relies on is a gamble.
• monooso 3y ago
  > ...that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country. The author appears to understand that perfectly well: > Those ccTLDs that clearly represent and are associated with a particular country are more likely to be OK... > Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality...
  • croemer 3y ago
    Then they should have added "US" here in the first few paragraphs: "Generic TLDs are what most [US] organisations and individuals register their domains under:"
    • jake200 3y ago
      I fail to see how that is helpful. Is the statement untrue without the [US] annotation? The author explicitly mentions that a user is the best judge of their country when deciding on whether to use that country's ccTLD. That's pretty implicit to me that the author is considering a larger audience than the US.
      • felixfbecker 3y ago
        Yes. Growing up in a non-US country, almost every website I interacted with or was advertised was the TLD of my home country. It was incredibly rare to see global TLDs. It usually implied it was a multi-national company, and even those often registered an additional domain locally because people are more familiar with it. I would guess this is the same for most countries except the US, which makes that statement untrue.
        • cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
          Yup. A mistake of the Internet that’ll surely never be corrected for at least the next 50 years at least, is rhe US not using a ccTLD like everyone else. Not being able to differentiate between a US and ‘global’ presence based on domain name is a tad annoying. The taxonomy is immensely useful. And please for the love of God nobody here lecture me about the history of the Internet. I know why it is the way it is. But it’s a frustrating legacy quirk. Anyone that sees it as anything else is just buying into the “the US is the universe’s ‘main country’” BS.
• Lucent 3y ago
  This is backwards. ccTLDs are much higher risk than gTLDs operated by commercial entities because those entities are governed by ICANN which has pricing requirements and a plan in place to transfer them if the entity goes under.
• AdamH12113 3y ago
  The whole TLD system is kind of broken and has been for decades, ever since companies starting buying the .net and .org versions of their domain names to go along with the (then) all-important .com. The TLDs were originally designed as a taxonomy of organization types. There was a fair bit of discussion about dropping TLDs altogether after the internet went mainstream and .com domain names became much scarcer, but there never seemed to be enough agreement to make it happen. It's interesting to think about how much of the old internet and its protocols were built around the assumption that internet-capable computers and (especially) networks were owned and tightly-administered by institutions, not individuals.
  • Terr_ 3y ago
    If I had my druthers, top level domains would exclusively be for sovereign legal jurisdictions. (And maybe EU or UN.) That way it would at least match all the indirect rules imposed by those jurisdictions, such as treaties over conflicting trademarks, and it would be clear which courts should get involved in any lawsuits or appeals, etc. It's kind of a Conway's Law thing: The system will suck the least when the code-organization is aligned to the group-entities. P.S.: Sure, if you launched a new global company you'd want to register lots of different domains, but that's already true anyway.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• throwanem 3y ago
  > they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country And lose the revenue? Caveat emptor.