Perhaps we (USAmericans) find the idea of carving up the internet along arbitrary political boundaries to be pointless and stupid. Physical location of internet servers is a non-issue. Internet sites should be categorized by content, not by which pointy hair government ministers oversee the block of earth that the box sits on.

So in short, yes we realize that you are there, we realize you have a lot of good internet content, but we have piss poor memory about where to find it. The differences between .com .org and .net are confusing enough, never mind whether that server was foo.or.uk or foo.or.jp. Everyone (even the French) should use the same TLDs, with the exception of .gov servers, which really ARE location-specific.

If the big corporations would stop sitting on hundreds of domain names that happen to be similar to their own name, there would be plenty of domains to go around, and nobody would have to rack their brains for the ISO country code for Uzbeckistan just to view a web page.
Surely, people in the US do know that they are not the whole world?

Judging from the WU immediately following yours, possibly not...

Cid: The big corporations, as they really are multinationals, are not the problem. And arbitrary political boundaries are no better or worse than any other arbitrary boudaries.

Like phone area codes and postcodes, the country domain suffixes are there for a reason - there simply aren't enough words in the OED to sustain the current rate of DNS abuse out there. The whole *.com, *.net etc. phenomenon isn't helping, and is completely unjustifiable unless one assumes (like you do) that Americans are lazy and have bad memories, or (like K9) that they have an inflated idea of their own importance.

To Cid Highwind:

Choice of domains has nothing to do with where the server is physically located; on the server I host my .net domain on, and will soon host my .ca domain on when I stop being so cheap and lazy, there are .com, .net, .org, .com.au, etc. domains.

Choice of top-level domain is made by the company who purchases it, to provide an easily rememberable name (say 'companyname') within a certain namespace (like .ca) which is associated with a certain country (like Canada). It has absolutely nothing to do with the location of the server, and you could easily register a .cx (Christmas Island) domain through a British registrar and host it on a box in Japan whose administrator is a Russian working for a German company, even though you are an Italian-American who is living in Israel and working for the CBC's news office.

Ok, that was overboard, but it was fun.

Anyway, country-code domains should (ideally) be used when the web page is only (usually) of interest to, or involved with, the people of one country. .com/net/org/edu/int domains should be used by corporations with international scope, .gov should not exist, and Air Canada should really lower its ticket prices. None of this will ever happen, but ideally, that's how it should be.

As for myself, I own a .net because when I registered it, 'sentry21@cdslash.lethbridge.ab.ca' just wasn't the epitome of cool that I was hoping to exhude. Now that I can just buy a .ca, I will do so, and phase out my .net, which I hope to do this year.

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