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Comment by monooso | Hacker News Reader

> ...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...

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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:"

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.

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.

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.

One annoying quirk of the .us cctld is that those administrators don't allow whois privacy like most gtlds do. So as soon as you register one, the phone number you associate with it gets destroyed by marketing solicitations.

So in addition to being a "frustrating legacy quirk", the administration of the cctld makes it more appealing to use a global tld whenever possible. That is not me buying into the BS you cite... it's just learned experience based on my dealings with those TLD aministrators.

(Source: I own multiple .us domains, and it's a headache for the reasons I described above.)

> I would guess this is the same for most countries except the US, which makes that statement untrue

Only if there are more organizations using ccTLDs outside of the US than organizations using generic domains within it.

https://domainnamestat.com/statistics/tldtype/all indicates that strictly based on domain registration counts, ccTLDs are around 39% of total domain registrations. So not nothing, but also not a majority.

> Only if there are more organizations using ccTLDs outside of the US than organizations using generic domains within it.

"Is the US larger than the world outside it?"

> ccTLDs are around 39% of total domain registrations.

My guess would be that generic domains have more unused registrations, squatting, and redirects to ccTLDs.

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