by Charles Miller

Last week in this column I expounded on TLDs (Top Level Domains) with which surely everyone is already familiar. Dot com, dot net, dot org, and dot edu are so ubiquitous that you would have to have been living without internet in a remote cave for the last three decades not to have at least heard of these.

In the 1980s before the internet was “a thing” with the general public, the United States Department of Commerce used to administer the assignment of all the world’s domain names. Dot com was intended for commercial use, dot org for organizations, dot edu for educational institutions, dot gov for government offices, dot mil for the U.S. military, and dot net… I have never been entirely sure about dot net being for networks because that would seem to overlap all the other classifications.

Soon after the internet was opened up for access to the general public it quickly went international and this led to the need to create country-code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) with every country having its own code. There are about 200 country Code Top-Level domains, including .mx for Mexico. The old generic TLDs and country-code TLDs can be used together which is why you sometimes see addresses ending in “.com.mx” meaning a commercial address in Mexico. And it is also perfectly legal to use just the ccTLD such as yahoo.mx which is the Mexican address for yahoo.com in Spanish.

Yahoo! makes for an interesting study of country code Top-Level domains because the company provides web pages in 20 languages many of which can be found by simply typing in “yahoo” followed by a country code TLD. For example typing in the address yahoo.de (Germany) will take you to the German language site. Entering the address yahoo.es (Spain), yahoo.gr (Greece), yahoo.jp (Japan) and many others including the original yahoo.com in English.

Some of the country codes have become popular outside the borders of the country represented by the code. An example of this is dot ai (Anguilla), a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean which is a domain name that has been used by a growing number of web sites involved in Artificial Intelligence. The use of a ccTLD is not restricted to any geographic location, so the popular web site perplexity.ai can use the dot ai (Anguilla) even though not located in Anguilla.

In the last few years there has been an absolute explosion of Top-Level Domains in addition to the dot com, dot edu, dot gov, etc. New TLDs such as dot computer, dot website, dot beer and dot pizza already exist. So do dot phd, dot prof, dot esq, dot zip, and dot mov.

In order to obtain the ownership of one of these country-code TLDs you need to be… well… a country or at least an entity associated with the specific country or territory. But anyone from anywhere in the world can apply to create and operate a new generic TLD not already assigned. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) accepts applications during designated time windows; simply include your non-refundable application fee of $227,000.00 USD for each TLD name applied for.

Creating new Top-Level Domains is not without controversy. Recently-created TLDs dot zip and .mov are seen as potentially problematic because the names of websites could be confused with file names. Dot .zip, is ubiquitous for data compression files, while Apple uses dot mov for video files. The concern is that website names that look like file names will open up even more possibilities for digital scams to trick web users into clicking on malicious links that are masquerading as something legitimate. This alone is a good reason for you to take time to read this column then to be better prepared to avoid falling victim to one of those scams.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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