Web addresses end in other countries?

In Australia we have www.whatever.com and also .com.au

How do they end in your country? I think the UK is co.uk and New Zealand is .co.nz

Am I right? If I am why is it .co and not .com?

Finally do American pages just use .com? If so, why?

Thanks in advance.

List of URL suffixes.

There are two kinds of “Top Level Domains.” The first kind is for each independent country and some non-sovereign countries IF they can make a case for it. These are alwasy two letter. There is some controversy about them. For instance there is .GB and .UK and then there is the whole mess with Yugoslavia and as the names change they try to change the country TLD.

There is another kind of “Top Level Domain” (TLD) and they can be used by anyone. The most common are .com, .org, .net

Anyone in any country can use a .com name if they can register it. Some countries like Tuvalu have taken advantage of their country TLD and promote as something else. For instance Tuvalu TLD is .tv. So the government of Tuvalu promotes its COUNTRY TLD as a word TV. For TV stations in America might like to use it and if they pay to register it they can.

Other countries like Somoa due the same thing. Somoa country TLD is .ws which can mean WebSite. Somoa was Western Somoa until they dropped the West and became Somoa, but their TLD didn’t change.

Most non country TLD like .com anyone can register but some you can’t. For instance the .gov is reserved for US Federal government, though a few local governments have slid under it from time to time. Other non country TLD have been made, .biz, .info, .museum, .areo, .coop and .cat (which stands for Catalian). That is an example of a part of a country Spain the lobbied for a non country TLD. It’s non country because it’s THREE letters.

Two international TLD have been OK’d the first was .nato and .int for international. These could only be registered by meeting criteria. Then came .eu which is also international but considered a country TLD because it’s two letters.

The whole point of domain names was to have a structured internet, but that fell apart quickly domain squatting and .com becoming the default domain name. Everyone assumes .com. For instance it should be goarmy.gov not goarmy.com but the army of the USA uses .com because everyone assumes everything is .com

Once you own a domain name you can subdivide it. For instance if I owned eric79.com I could make subdomains and sell them if my webhost permitted it. Like joe.eric79.com would be a secondary domain name.

.nz is a top level domian .co.nz is a secondary level domain name. And whoever is in charge of the .nz can dicatate the terms of allowing other people to register.

Well, they use goarmy.com for their recruiting campaigns, but all their real business is conducted via army.mil. Like .gov, .mil is reserved for the US; it is a descendant of what used to be MILNET.

And in map form.

I’m not sure, but I think US pages end just in .com because that’s where the Web originated. Not a satisfying explanation, but I think that’s it.

There are .com URLS here in NZ, but co.nz, ac.nz, org.nz, govt.nz are most common.

That’s it. There is a .us TLD in existence - for example www.google.us

Similarly: .co.uk, .gov.uk, .org.uk, .mod.uk (Ministry of Defence) .ac.uk and .sch.uk (academic institutions and schools), .nhs.uk (health service). There’s a few random individual institutions outside of this system, which I believe simply predate this becoming fully organised, such as www.bl.uk (British Library).

At the same time, plenty of British sites use .com addresses

Back around 1998 I had a personal webpage with the address Team Messenger & Online Collaboration Platform – Flock

It never occured to me until just now that the “go.to” part of that was a very cleverly registered country code.

goatse.cx, anyone?

And that’s the same reason that Tuvalu makes a huge amount of money renting out their .TV domain.

I never realized that “cx” was the code for Christmas Island. Clever!

(I’ve never seen the link in question, but I’ve read descriptions. Simply put: Guy stretching his anus.)

Rico, that site has been down for awhile, now.

Some countries are very strict about Top Level Domain use.

Australia is one of them. To register a com.au address, you need to be a registered business owner with the business name identical or very close to the name you wish to use if you want an .au TLD. There are miles of paperwork. On the other hand, plain old .com is available globally on a first come first served basis, so a lot of Australians with a private website (myself included) will use that instead. I’d like to have .au, but it’s just not worth the trouble. The Australian authorities responsible for all this (I forget their name now) have authorised the domain .id.au for individuals, but as I guessed there was a low take-up rate of that, because it’s counter-intuitive and clunky.

Yep - two-click rule, there’s a link to it preserved on the Internet Archive from Wikipedia, if anyone really needs to see it: goatse.cx - Wikipedia

Spain is .es but that’s more expensive than .com so most people use the .com if it’s available; also, companies that are or intend to be multinational will use .com, .net or .anythingtheycancomeupwith rather than .es

Nobody uses .co.es

The catalans keep making noise about getting a separate .cat but I don’t know how that stands right now.

They’ve got it, but it’s non-territorial: .cat - Wikipedia

Most Israeli businesses use *.co.il, if most of their business is in-country; if they have international business then it’s hard to give hard and fast rules. Some use co.il anyway (and then they generally have a “For English click here” button on the main page); some use .com (and then the Main Page is generally in English). Some use both (e.g., the oft-quoted-here “Ha’Aretz” newspaper – English version is www.haaretz.com; Hebrew is www.haaretz.co.il,) with cross-references from each language-specific Home Page to the other language.

Norway has no fixed domain system below .no except for municipalities and schools who have kommune.no and skole.no.

Norwegian domains are much more expensive than .com, .org., .net but the cost would still be a blip on a business’ budget. The domain authority for .no also controls .sj and .bv, but considering the rules (you have to have a company with main address in the area of the domain) there are few .sj domains, and no .bv domains.

The Web was invented by an Englishman working in Switzerland, so that’s certainly not it.