When I upload a YouTube video, it says “Your video will be live at http://youtu.be/” and then a bunch of letters and numbers.
Why does it say “youtu.be” instead of “youtube.com”? What does “youtu.be” mean anyway?
It’s a way to make shorter URLs, useful for Twitter and other places with limited space. For example, they give the following URL:
Youtu.be/c6K9P58Yf7E
Which is the shortened link to (automatically redirected when you follow the above):
Those weird numbers and letters are just the ID of the video.
.be is the country code for Belgium. The .me and .gl country codes, mentioned in the shorter urls link above are Montenegro and Greenland. ETA: Wikipedia linky.
I’d guess they’re limited to existing TLDs. So SDMB could use .sd (Sudan), but not .mb (not listed there).
And in case you’re wondering, the top-level domain “.be” belongs to Belgium. All two-letter top-level domains belong to some country or another, and the country can decide to allow or not allow registrations in that domain according to whatever criteria they want. Nowadays, most countries have decided that the criterion they want to use is “anyone who pays us”, and so many sites now buy up domains based purely on having letters that they like.
It’s just uses the Belgian country code top level domain .be as a way to spell out youtube.
And at least one country makes a fair proportion of its income from doing so: Tuvalu, who are .tv .
Are the Belgians aware of YouTube sprouting on their domain?
Certainly. They control the TLD name servers that send people there.
No doubt Belgium is collecting a hefty fee from Google/Youtube for this.
Why would Google pay more than the $20 a year or whatever it takes to register any other domain? The only hefty sum that Google might have had to pay is if someone was already using youtu.be for some other purpose (or was domain squatting). And even then, Google might have been able to strongarm the domain away via trademark law.
Are you sure trademark is sufficient for URLs? I thought it was a contract thing, and thus different for each registrar.
But, in theory, it would be because Belgium would not want to allow a non-Belgian company to have access to its domains without paying some sort of out-of-country fee.
Well… it depends. As best I can tell, courts take multiple factors into account, such as priority, similarity of names, chance of confusion, and so on. If someone had been running a company called “Youtu” out of Belguim for longer than Youtube had been around, then in all likelihood they’d get to keep the domain. If it was clearly a case of someone noticing that youtu.be is a clever shortening of Youtube and squatting on it to get some kind of payout, then most likely they would at most get the equivalent of Google’s lawyer fees (i.e., Google would win in court, but it’s in their interest to just settle for something less than what the lawyers would get).
As best I can tell, this is not the case:
http://www.eurodns.com/top-level-domain/Belgium/be
As they mention:
• A .BE domain will create a unique web identity for your business
• Anyone can register any .BE name
• All .BE domain names can be traded freely
• .BE enables you to protect your business online
• Your web address with a .BE is easily memorable for local community and helps you reach and communicate with the right audience in Belgium and globally
I noticed a while back that if you click the “share” button on a video, you are automatically provided with the shortened link:
vs:
I like to use the shortened link as it seems more elegant somehow.
Youtube.com uses the very popular .com Top Level Domain or TLD. On the other hand, Youtu.be takes the .be domain. This is not one of the top level domains but is one of the country specific domains; .be is the domain reserved for Belgium to be precise. There is actually no rule that says people from other countries can use country specific domains. A good example of this is Tuvalu’s ccTLD, which is .tv. Tuvalu is a little known island nation but their domain is used mostly by television stations because it is the same as the abbreviation for television.Difference Between Youtube.com and Youtu.be | Difference Between
Considering that Tuvalu is an island nation in mid-Pacific with fewer than 11 000 people, and it may well be swamped by the rising Pacific in the next hundred years, I figure they need all the help they can get…
A similar service is provided by the company Bitly, which, interestingly, uses the country code for Libya. The point is, if you have to type in a URL, it’s easier to type 10 alphanumeric characters that make no sense than 25 characters that make only a little sense (What is "youtu.be"? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board)
They could, if they chose, charge an extra out-of-country fee. It appears that they have not so chosen.
I wonder if there are any .va domains for sale?
I’ve wondered this myself.
So what happens when my browser requests something from youtu.be? I assume it has to go to a computer physically in Belgium to resolve the name to an IP address, right? And is that all?
I guess that DNS server would then give an IP address based on the location of the requester? So that a user in the US would be pointed to a server in the US?
There’s no reason why the nameserver must be located in Belgium. Like most TLDs, they probably have multiple nameservers which can be resolved by IP anycast load balancing.
No. That’s not the way it works.
When your browser requests something, the computer first looks in its local hosts file. Very few people put anything in their local hosts file these days so chances are there isn’t anything interesting there. From there it goes to the DNS server configured for your computer, which may be your local router (if you have one) or it may be a computer on your internet provider’s network (some routers will give you an IP and DNS through DHCP, which is an automatic way of assigning IP addresses and such).
If that DNS server doesn’t have an entry for that name, it goes up the hierarchy of DNS servers, from one server to the next, until it either finds a server that has the entry or it reaches one of the 13 “root” DNS servers. These root servers are the guys with the master list of names for the entire internet, and all 13 of them have an identical copy of the list.
Belgium has control over who gets a .be address. Twenty years ago, it would have been very surprising for them to give a .be address to someone who wasn’t physically in Belgium. That changed quite some time ago though, as many countries discovered that they could make some decent money by selling domain names with their country’s top level domain. The island of Tuvalu, for example, figured that they weren’t going to make much money selling domain names to their own people, but folks in Hollywood who make television shows would be much more interested in paying good money for a .tv web address. While .tv gets a lot of use outside of the island of Tuvalu, .be doesn’t get much use outside of Belgium.
Thanks for the explanation. Let’s take the example of me browsing to a youtu.be site, and I’m surfing from home with Time Warner internet.
First, I would assume that my PC can cache host names somewhere (yes, I know of the hosts file from my playing around with Unix long ago, and know that it’s disused). Is that right? If I looked at a web page five minutes ago at the youtu.be site, surely my browser doesn’t ask again?
So next, my PC’s DHCP settings use the Time Warner DNS server that their DHCP settings specify (I haven’t overridden that). Will they cache the IP address of youtu.be at that point?
Then, if that DNS server doesn’t have the listing, does that server tell my browser to check with the next level up, or does the DNS server do the checking on my behalf? And does my DNS server have just one of its own DNS servers that it uses? How many levels will there be to get up to one of the root servers?
I’m probably at the 98th percentile for understanding the Internet out of the general population, but here at the Dope the percentile is a much lower number.