No One Is Using Top Level Domains Correctly

. com,. net,. org, these are all TLD, top level domains, that thing you see at the end of a URL. YouTube,. com, X,. com, your favourite adult website,. com. These are all basic, original TLD, but there are a lot more of them. And I thought it'd be fun to highlight some of the interesting ones, why they exist, and sort of, in many ways, where they came from. And you might be confused by this starting point, but I think a really good place to start is. gov. If you're in the United States of America, you're probably used to seeing governmentsite. gov. For example, USA. gov. And you might assume that. gov is for government use only. And you would be correct. Sort of. It's not for worldwide government use, it is specifically only for the United States government. In Australia, you will often see. gov,. au. In the UK,. gov,. uk, sometimes just. uk, and other countries have similar forms as well... gov,. whatever their country code TLD is. When we're talking about these cases outside the United States,. gov is not actually part of their TLD. The only TLD there is the country code at the end, the. au or the. uk. But having. gov in the URL is a very convenient structure to indicate government websites, so it's a very common form to use. And as you might guess, it also has its own dedicated name. This is an SLD or a 2LD. It is a second level domain. And different countries have their own different forms of these. Going back to Australia, we have. com. au,. net. au,. gov. au,. csiro. au. I don't know why this one isn't just a TLD, but I'm sure there's a reason for that. And some of these actually are restricted... edu,. au,. gov,. au, and. csiro. au can't be registered by just anyone out there. Those are specifically restricted. So even though. gov in. gov. au isn't the TLD, you can't just go and pretend to be a government website in Australia. And that is the case for a lot of other countries as well. For example,. gov. uk, that's for government use specifically, and not any random person go and register that. If you want to go and check out other SLD, I'll leave this Wikipedia page linked down below. This is not the main focus of today's video, though. Thought I would mention it because it is somewhat related. Why it's like this, I'm not 100% certain, but in many ways is probably due to the internet forming out of the US military's ARPANET... ARPA actually is still used, but that is reserved for internet infrastructure, with US military use being on. mil. Moving away from the government, are you aware there are non-ASCII domain names? So not TLD, but the part in the middle. So the YouTube part of YouTube. com. You can have emoji domain names. Now, most registrars and most TLD do not support emoji domain names, but this is a thing that does exist. Also, there are internationalized domain names as well, so you can actually have a domain name in something like Cyrillic. In the same vein, and often used in conjunction, there are also internationalized TLD. Now, unlike with the domain names, it can't just be anything. It is still a TLD, so there is still a specific set of them, but you can have a TLD that is in Chinese characters. The fun thing about the Chinese character ones is some of these also have to be shared with Japan, because some of those character combinations also have a meaning in kanji. For instance, Sekai, which is world. Or we have Jizen, which is philanthropy. Or Koeki, which is also philanthropy. This is a problem with translating languages, but Japan is not forced to just share them with China. There are specific ones in Hiragana and Katakana as well. You also have Cyrillic TLD, and a random assortment of other ones which don't have enough to make their own list by themselves. Do note the Hebrew one, okay? That's very important. So we also have... We also have Arabic TLD. Why are Hebrew and Arabic important here? These are not left-to-right languages. They are right-to-left. And in the TLD, they also put the dot on the right-hand side. Building a browser and having to support both left-to-right and right-to-left text, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind

that this creates a nightmare of rendering problems. Now, to my understanding, you are not able to actually mix them. So you can't have an Arabic TLD and then an English domain name. That doesn't work, I think. Now, you might have noticed all of these DNS names on the side here. XN, dash, and then a big string of characters. So this is also true for internationalized domain names. And technically, they're not actually really properly supported. So they're supported in the browser. And to the user, they will be rendered correctly. But on the DNS side, DNS is a whole mess of standards and old hardware and complex nonsense. So, supporting non-ASCII characters, especially when we start moving into emoji domains, which emoji is still an evolving format, um, yeah, you need some way to deal with that. So what was thought of is something known as puny code. Effectively, what it is, is an encoding algorithm that takes every Unicode character and then represents it as a string of ASCII characters. This is just a backwards compatibility thing, and it's probably always going to be there. A couple of times in this video, I've mentioned the concept of country code TLD or ccTLD. These are indicators for various countries out there. An Australian site might be on. au, a Japanese site,. jp, Canadian. ca. Now, if you're in any country, you don't have to use your country code. You can use. com, you can use. xyz, you can use any of the other TLD that are available to you. But if you want to indicate that your website is from a certain country, that is their function. On paper. On the topic of Australia, we actually were given. oz or. oz before we had. au. Different countries get to decide on who gets to use their TLD. For instance, if you're in France and you want to use. fr, that is available to you. It's also available in the rest of the European Union, along with Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. Other countries might be a lot more restrictive and require you specifically to be in that country, or maybe specifically be in that country's government. But a lot of countries out there are... I'm not even going to say lenient. Completely open. Let you do whatever you want with it. If you see a two-character-long TLD, this is a country code TLD. Even in cases where it is not being used to indicate a country. For example,. ai. You've probably seen it for AI tools. That's from Anguilla, a British territory... am, often used for AM radio sites. That's from Armenia... fm, often used for FM radio and podcast sites. That is from the Federated State of Micronesia,. cn, which obviously you might guess is from China. But for some reason, older Cartoon Network domains also were allowed to use it. Why? I don't know... cx, which if you've been on the internet long enough, you might remember from Goatse. That's from the Christmas Islands... gg, often used by gaming websites, is from Guernsey... ms, often used by Microsoft, is from Montserrat, another British territory... ly, often used for adding the letters L-Y onto your names. You might have, um, Hackley, or, I don't know, other, other funny things that you can probably think of. That's from Libya... rs, often used by Rust Projects, that's from Serbia... tv. This is a weird case. So obviously, it was often used for television-related websites. But even though it is from Tuvalu, it is primarily owned by the US-based company VeriSign. The country actually only has about 20% ownership of it. If you follow this channel, one a lot of you may know about is. io. This is used for IO games. This is like a specific type of web game. And this is from the British Indian Ocean Territory, or the Chagos Islands. The problem is, um, these islands are being given to the Republic of Mauritius, which would mean that they no longer need their own country code, and. io would be phased out. At least, that's how it works under the typical rules. Nothing has been fully set here.

I believe things are supposed to happen in a couple of years, but that's what's supposed to happen. But we do have examples of what happens to a country code TLD when a country just doesn't exist anymore. For instance,. yu. This was for Yugoslavia. It was given to them in 1989. And, uh, well, Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore. But you do have Serbia and Montenegro. And for a while, they were actually using. yu before being given their own TLD, that being. rs for Serbia, and. me for Montenegro in 2007. Then. yu was phased out as of 2010. We have another example... su. For the Soviet Union. So, Russia now has. ru, also an internationalized version, which is this right here. I don't know how to read that symbol. So, they were given. su in September of 1990. The Soviet Union dissolved about 15 months later. Now, Russia wasn't assigned. ru until 1994. So, until that point, they kept using. su. That was totally fine. After which, though, it was supposed to be retired. That is how it is supposed to work. Russia's response was basically, no. It's ours now. We're just going to keep using it. In 2001, they actually began selling new registrations to the TLD, which they were not supposed to be doing. In 2007, they were still arguing about it. And then, as of 2025, ICANN basically told them, we don't care anymore. It's going to be phased out as of 2030. It's not going to be supported. And we'll see if that actually happens. Because, at this point, it's pretty much outside of Russian businesses, pretty much being used by cyber criminals, by, like, malware, CC servers, and things like that. For the most part, it doesn't have legitimate use. There is some legitimate use within Russia, but that's basically it. Since we're on the topic of country code TLD, did you know that some countries, at least when it was still operating, allowed their TLD to be used for free domain name registration? So, most TLD, you've got to pay for, whether it's a couple of dollars, some TLD are more expensive because they are more desirable. Things like. com, they tend to cost quite a bit more, especially for shorter names. But, there was a Dutch company called Freenom, and. tk from Tokelau,. cf from the Central African Republic,. ga from Gabon, and. ml from Mali, these were actually available to just, register a domain for free. You could just, anyone could do it. It was basically there as a public service. Now, some would argue it wasn't a public service, and more like a, kind of scam, because there were cases of, domain names that started getting really popular, instead of just being given out for free, instead than being sold from the person who is using it. Because you don't actually own a domain name, you're basically just renting it, and since you didn't pay for it, well, what are you going to do to stop us? There is also another type of location-based TLD that is not a country code TLD, and this is usually based on either a city, or some general vibe of a location. For instance, there is. boston,. miami,. nyc,. lat,. rio, or if you go to my part of the world, you have. melbourne,. sydney, and even. kiwi for the New Zealanders. Throughout this video, I've mostly discussed the idea of ccTLD, your country code TLD, and some of the basic, generic top-level domains, gTLD. There are other ones as well. You have infrastructure TLD, this is your ARPA stuff, this is not stuff that you as a general user ever interact with. There is a subset of the generic TLD, which are restricted for certain use, things like. mil, for example. You have your sponsored TLD, which is basically, somebody has an idea, and they are willing to pay for it, say, you know, we want certain kinds of content to be on this. For example,. tripleX. I wonder what that one's for. You have also your test TLD. These are ones you can't register anything to, but are there for the sake of actually testing things, making sure that things actually work, especially when we're talking about, like, right-to-left rendering, for example. However, I have barely scratched the surface on the G-TLD. The G-TLD

this is where hell incarnate lives. There is so much here, so much that I'm gonna have to do a follow-up video on this, because ICANN maintains a list of all the TLD, and you might have an idea of how many TLD there are. You have no idea Absolutely none. With that being said, I'm gonna leave you there for now, and, uh, we'll do a follow-up video if you guys wanna see it on some of the, uh, some of the fun ones. For instance, did you know there are also corporate TLD? Where companies have their own TLD? Now you do! Anyway, if you learnt something, go like the video. If you enjoyed the video, go like the video, go subscribe as well, and let me know your thoughts down below. Let me know about some dumb TLD that you know about that maybe no one even realises exists. I would love to hear about it. Anyway, yeah, go subscribe, said that. Uh, if you really wanna become one of these amazing people over here, check out the Patreon, SubscribeStar, Liberapay, linked in the description down below. That's gonna be it for me, and TLDR