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Comment by dustmop | Hacker News Reader

Having names ending in ".com" is great - it says explicitly that the thing is a web address. Just like how the hyphenation of a phone number 123-456-7890 tells you right away that it's a phone number. This is part of why ".com" is more desirable than ".net", ".org", et al. It also shows how blatantly stupid this idea is, since it removes all framing from a web address, making the web harder overall to use.

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I guess all those .no, .de, .it, .se, .dk and all those other national TLDs just represent pretend-sites then. Not to belittle you, but you seem to have an incredibly Americanized and introverted impression of how people percieve DNS names.

I have .com's, .net's and .org's. I use different TLDs for sites I believe represent different kinds of content, purpose and community. Having everything as .com would seem incredibly unnuanced for me.

I think it depends on where people live. When I see foo.py I think of a Python filename, but I might think differently if I lived in Paraguay.

But outside of country TLDs I haven't really seen much adoption of .name, .biz, .mobi, etc.

This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the average non-techie. Yes, I realize how West-centric the point of view is, and that's unfortunate. But it's exactly why we have "dot-com businesses" and the "dot-com bubble", as opposed to the "dot-com-and-net-and-org-and-co-uk-... bubble".

At least keeping the set of TLDs small and restricted to standardized names, or countries that people using them will recognize, helps to keep the recognition problem manageable. But allowing anything and everything for a domain name removes all hope of recognizing one without context.

This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the average non-techie.

That would be a non-techie in the US. Outside the US, people have to deal with more TLDs, more people are multilingual and hence exposed to more information from more countries, in more languages.

If non-techies in the rest of the world have one common trait, it is that they recognize the www-prefix as "Internet", not the com-suffix.

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