this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
49 points (96.2% liked)
Rust
5923 readers
11 users here now
Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.
Wormhole
Credits
- The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Obviously this isn't specific to Rust, but frankly it's bizarre to me that ICANN chose to tie top-level domains to country codes in the first place. Languages might have made sense, but a major feature of the internet is that it's less beholden to political boundaries than most of the physical world is.
It's more bizarre that a single organisation would have such tight control over the Internet. Assigning a tld to each country is a good way to appease each country and give them autonomy over their own portion
But do they actually have autonomy, give that random companies can use
.io
and.ai
? Or did the British Indian Ocean Territory and Anguilla approve all such uses of those domains?Yep. The governments typically select who administers the tld and then get a lump sum or portion of the revenues.
For
.ai
it was 10% of their GDP in 2023 which is insane...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai
Wow, I definitely should have google that myself before asking, but thank you for explaining and calling out that data point.
I honestly think that shows that it was in fact a bad idea to assign TLDs to countries. Having a country code acronym with a popular tech meaning is essentially just luck of the draw, so they've basically just arbitrarily given a few small countries a valuable resource to sell. I guess that benefits those countries, but I doubt "quasi-random fundraising for small countries" was ever the intent.
They are just iso country codes though, so it is just the luck that some have become so popular.
Some countries are pretty strict that their tlds must be local or at least provide translation in the regional language. The cook islands for instance have prime opportunity with .co.ck but they refuse the to let people take advantage
There are several cctld where the entity buying the domain needs to be a local. EU is an example for that. De requires you to be able appoint a representative within 2 weeks living in Germany.
Canada specifically won't issue .ca without proof of residence in the country, or something close to that.
I think .io is unfortunately administered by a group outside of the country it's related to. Which means they have less control at the moment (something something British colonialism or something)
But yeah imo country code tlds should be limited to businesses / people who reside within the specific country.
We have soo many other tld options that are better choices.
It makes a lot of sense for businesses, especially where different countries might have different regulations. E.g., amazon.ca and amazon.in. Both sites are in English but it makes way more sense to split them up by country.
Why top-level, though? Why not amazon.in.com?
Interestingly enough, you also have amazon.co.uk, which combines the nature (commercial) and location served (UK), but in the opposite order.