I love the old interent. I'll confess I have three locality domains and they are wonderful.
I'll confess I have successfully registered a locality domain this year (2025) and it was a little bit fun to go through the weird hoops to get this new domain registered.
I'm also working on/helping out a registrar whose owned died and his widow is resolving what to do with the non-profit.
A related quaint couple of blogs[1][2] if you're feeling nostalgic and motivated to register your own:
Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use.
Australia does the same for organizations regulated at the state level, like schools. However, while all other states/territories do $SCHOOL.$STATE.edu.au:
For Queensland it looks like private schools get a .qld.edu.au domain and state schools get an .eq.edu.au one. For example: https://www.twgs.qld.edu.au/ .
When I was at university, we had http://cs.mu.oz.au (Computer Science, at University of Melbourne). That domain name has stuck in my head, even though it isn't in use anymore.
country wide like that must be a bit of a pain for local web admins for those municipalities to make changes through the bureaucracy of government DNS/registrar keyholders. I have a friend who works for a university web services and adding any subdomain takes months to a year+ with committees, boards, meetings and approvals they have to go through first
There are still rules on who gets priority on names: toronto.ca is the government but toronto.com is a news organization; ditto for canada.ca and canada.com; ontario.ca versus ontario.com; etc.
The three/four-level domains are now generally grandfathered.
in what I find to be unfortunate, I have noticed a trend in the reverse direction.
http://shoreviewmn.gov/ should have a dot between the city and the state. they chose some form of human usability over precision. I trust it ever so slightly less, because it is cute before hierarchical.
https://www.mvpschools.org/ formerly https://www.moundsviewschools.org are the domain names for a school district. The fact they chose the P between mv and school (which stands for public) makes it look like phishing or social engineering. It erodes trust in both technical decisions and branding decisions made.
Because domains are hard to read, and people were never taught to read them, we lost out on being able to establish trust because something reads "mv.k12.mn.us" (or preferably us.mn.k12.mv) which is two characters SHORTER than mvpschools.org!
My old school district moved from a localized URL of this kind to a .org a number of years ago (in the early 2010s). It seems to just have become the style, but I never really got it. I'm sure there was a significant cost to migrating what was a perfectly working setup to a whole new domain for website and email!
> Technically speaking, the top of the DNS tree, the DNS root, is a null label referenced by a trailing dot. It's analogous to the '/' at the beginning of POSIX file paths. "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu." to make it absolute rather than relative
I have never seen this, but I just tried it and it seems like browsers, even today will happily handle such URLs.
If you work much with DNS, you will know about this. It is known as a FQDN, or a "fully qualified domain name", when the name ends with a .
When you don't use a FQDN, your DNS system is going to try to figure out if you mean a FQDN or actually belong to a subdomain.
On *nix, your /etc/resolv.conf file can have a "search" entries for search domains... that means that a lookup for "foo" will check "foo.bar.com" if "search bar.com" is in your /etc/resolv.conf
This does mean your query could end up making multiple queries to determine if you meant foo. OR foo.bar.com
You can configure how the machine makes the guesses with something called ndots... if you add "ndots 3" to your etc/resolv.conf, then your DNS queries will only try treating the domain as a FQDN if it has at least 3 dots... so for example, it would skip querying for foo as a TLD because it has no dots, and assume you mean "foo.bar.com", saving an unneeded DNS query.
This usually doesn't matter to people, but it can have big performance implications for things like Kubernetes, with lots of .svc.local bits being left off of internal queries and relying on search domains; by increasing the ndots, you avoid a ton of wasted queries.
Some browsers (and web servers, proxies, and other things) treat "example.com" and "example.com." differently for various things, like the default limit of per-domain parallel connections. See for instance https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-...
They need to, as when the "." is not present, your search domains are used, but they are not used when the trailing "." is present.
For example, if you enter "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com", and your search domains contain one item called "mycompany.tld", then the browser will first query DNS servers for "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.", and when an NXDOMAIN is returned, they will try "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.mycompany.tld." next. If you type "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com." in the browser directly, only the first query is attempted.
.su is available for registration, I'm not sure what the "in a limited way" is about. In Russia it's used to communicate old-schoolness, approximately.
Outside Russia it’s limited to renewals of existing domains due to sanctions. I believe ICANN is trying to eliminate the domain entirely due to it being obsolete, although I don’t know if a formal timeframe has been established for that yet.
It definitely is. In Germany, somebody was selling fraudulent public transit e-tickets on an .su domain for a while last year.
Not sure who the “.su” was supposed to appeal to, but they were slightly cheaper than officially licensed ones, which probably helped more than the TLD :)
- gTLD stands for "generic TLD"[1], not a short form of global, comes from their "generic" usage. Both two categories of TLDs are in the domain namespace which is globally resolvable.
- Almost all of two-letter ASCII ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes, from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, but there are a few exceptions: the United Kingdom (GB) has ".uk"[2], Ascension Island (now part of SH) has ".ac", etc. (Yes, there are more non-ASCII ccTLDs: .新加坡, .УКР, etc.)
If you want to briefly take a look at how TLD registries structure their second/third level such as "k12.or.us" or "chiyoda.tokyo.jp", see "ICANN DOMAINS" section of the public suffix list[3] (note: it is not complete)
Yeah of course adding the extra dot will work. The dot at the end simply means do not try to append the local search domain. Interestingly bad “security” software will often block domains without the trailing dot but permit the one with the trailing dot.
The problem of having two hierarchies in opposite directions means that it is advantageous to store it while reversing one of the hierarchies. I think the earliest Google Search backend used a format like org.myorg.something/something internally. This representation worked great for key-value storage systems where the keys are sorted.
I didn’t realize how far these had fallen out of fashion. I maintained http://kenn.cr.k12.ia.us for a time, and it was so hard to remember that domain (scarcely easier than an IP address) until I tried to understand it. It’s now kennedy.crschools.us.
My high school is still at www-bths.stjohns.k12.fl.us, and if it wasn’t embedded in my fingertips from working IT there I’d have no idea how anyone is supposed to remember it.
I did sysadmin work for both a .k12.oh.us and a co.countyname.oh.us. Users at both hated the suffix on email addresses. The hierarchy appeals to the nerd in me but I understand the difficulty people had trying to communicate the addresses to others. (Both now use a .com and .gov domain, respectively...)
> ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes of each country, and are intended for use by those countries, while gTLDs are arbitrary and reflect the fact that DNS was designed in the US. The ".gov" gTLD, for example, is for use by the US government, while the UK is stuck with ".gov.uk".
Fun fact, the UK's ISO country code is not actually "uk", but "gb". IIRC, ".uk" was grandfathered in (from JANET?) as an exception: ".gb" officially existed for a while in parallel, but no one ever used it and I think it's now defunct.
Cloudflare refuses to accept most locality based domains as delegated because they aren’t listed in the Public Suffix List[1]. So for example you can’t use Cloudflare DNS or get a TLS cert for it from them.
Fortunately they seem to be one of the few (only?) providers who does that. So use another DNS provider and Letsencrypt and you’re good to go.
My community college was occ.cccd.edu when I attended, where cccd.edu was the community college district, and they had registered their domain in 1993, but now the individual colleges have their own domain names, registered in 2002, 2004 and 2007. But there definitely was a time where only 4 year schools and museums were getting new .edus
My school didn't have a domain name or even an email address, or even an internet connection. I think it had 1 or 2 BBC Micros though. I remember playing a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Funny how memory works - I assumed I'd remember nothing as so long ago, but remember sitting in the room playing that game now, can't remember why I could though (why I had free access).
Based on the age of the bbc micro, no way it was scorched earth, tanx seems likely (I think it was 3d tanx? I have a vague memory of seeing this in a vintage collection)
> Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so?
I don't think so. Godaddy won't delegate new third level domains, and I don't think the second level (states) were ever delegated?? But if you can find a city.ca.us that is delegated and that person/organization is willing to register a new name, you could maybe do that.
It did always make me really annoyed they didn’t deprecate .gov, .edu and .mil and transition to moving those under .us (as .gov.us, .edu.us and .mil.us).
Having them as basically US-only just reeks of American exceptionalism which most of the world finds very distasteful.
They would, but even orgs that have historically had .int domains tend to move off them to either their own TLD (like CERN moving to .cern) or to other gTLDs (like the Commonwealth of Nations from commonwealth.int to commonwealth.org.) Ironically, NATO was using .nato briefly in 1990 before moving to .nato.int
So, CSTO using csto.org rather than csto.int is probably just keeping up with the times, not failing to get an .int
I'm annoyed that Postel didn't deprecate .com/.net/.org after ccTLDs were introduced. Would have made DNS so much cleaner and at least have a chance of making the hierarchy/tld somewhat meaningful.
I don't think there's any reason to deprecate .edu and move it under the us TLD. Nothing about .edu is US-specific, unlike gov and mil. You could perfectly reasonably have oxford.edu, etc.
I'll confess I have successfully registered a locality domain this year (2025) and it was a little bit fun to go through the weird hoops to get this new domain registered.
I'm also working on/helping out a registrar whose owned died and his widow is resolving what to do with the non-profit.
A related quaint couple of blogs[1][2] if you're feeling nostalgic and motivated to register your own:
[1] https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/
[2] http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html
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