"Why do we have TLDs in the first place?" Am I misunderstanding your question? There needed to be a way to separate, say harvard the university from harvard th

"Why do we have TLDs in the first place?" Am I misunderstanding your question? There needed to be a way to separate, say harvard the university from harvard the ISP from harvard the non-profit to harvard the commercial company. Etc. Although now (with the exception of .edu) .com .net .org can be used by anyone for any reason at the start they were a way to differentiate different types of sites so many people could use one string. And of course there were country code domains, (say harvard.it which is owned by a Italian company) etc. With no TLD's there would just be http://harvard http://harvard - one user of the string harvard.