After years in limbo, the Taliban recently began reoperating Afghanistan's .af TLD, which is breaking parts of the internet.
  • Amju Wolf
    7•4 months ago

    They’re two separate(ish) issues.

    But it’s still a bad idea to use national TLDs for stuff that has nothing to do with that nation.

    Granted, is ICANN wasn’t just a money-grabbing machine with no forward thinking they wouldn’t give nations clearly “generally desirable” gTLDs, but since they did already that doesn’t mean they should be misused.

    • davehtaylor
      5•4 months ago

      It’s really frustrating in general how TLDs have been misused and abused over the years. They used to have very specific meanings and usages. Now anyone can register a .net or .org, and don’t have to prove they’re a network service provider or a non-profit.

      People also forget that URLs designate a hierarchy, reading from right to left. For example, take the URL app.foobar.com This designates

      . -> There’s an understood period at the end that’s not typed. But it designates the root (or, well, top in this case) of the hierarchy
      com -> The commercial space (hence top level domain)
      foobar -> Company named Foobar in the commercial space
      app -> The app site/service/etc from Foobar

      If you’re using a domain like foobar.tv, you’re saying you’re an organization called Foobar based in Tuvalu. There’s still plenty of restricted TLDs (.gov and .mil e.g.), but everything has been thrown to the wind for the sake of cleverness, and spammers have ruined anything else that’s not .com for your average user. Your personal info site generally isn’t a commercial page, so .com doesn’t make sense. But other gTLDs get blocked by default by so many admins, it’s pointless to try.

    • @[email protected]
      2•4 months ago

      Perhaps I just don’t see why countries need their own extensions anyway (other than ones reserved for government websites to avoid scams, but at the point of being available for public use that kinda falls down)

      • @master5o1
        1•4 months ago

        Local companies may have similar names to others that exist overseas.

        To require them to be in a globally common non-regionalised pool of domain names is more likely to increase scam risks.

        Should the various regional companies of the Vodafone brand be forced to have all their world wide customers sign in to a global parent organisation Vodafone.com? Is it not better for the regionally specific customer portal be vodafone.com.au and vodafone.co.uk?

        • @[email protected]
          1•4 months ago

          Yeah that makes sense I suppose.

          I still think for the vast majority of io websites I’ve seen they probably wouldn’t clash with any companies that need portals in those regions

          There’s also a large amount of first come first served with domains regardless of what extension they’re using though, if there’s no legislation around who can use what extension I’m still not convinced it’s that big a deal