Ok, I know there is a .us (and a lot of local govt. agencies use them), but most US addresses get com/edu/gov, etc. Why do we get the simple addresses? The British Amazon has to use .co. and .uk. And www.cambridge.edu gives you Cambridge College in Mass. For Cambridge in the UK you have to add .ac. and .uk. It’s as if the default for all things internet is the US, and everyone else has to all the other junk. Do other countries get their own abbreviations? Is there, say, in German, .ge for Geschaft (Business in German)?
The US invented the Internet. If you don’t like it, we’re going to take the ball and go home, nyeah. (Said attitude of course ticks of the rest of the world.)
The next lower domains, .co.uk, are entirely up to that country’s Internet governance people. Some do, most don’t. Having a lot of different suffixes makes things messy and shouldn’t be allowed. E.g., why have straightdope.com and straightdope.net and straightdope.org and …?
Note that you don’t have to be located in the US to get a .com domain, etc., but it is frowned upon in some circles.
All countries (including the US) have two-letter top-level domains assigned to them. Each country can dole out domains under their TLD however they see fit. In fact, pretty much anyone in the US can get a .us domain if they want.
The more common TLDs, .com, .net, .org and some newer ones including .biz and .info and so on are available to anyone, in any country. Because a domain ends in .com does not mean it is a US-centric site or that it is hosted in the US. However, since the Internet evolved from US government projects and US universities, most of these TLDs were at one time controlled by the US government, making them difficult to acquire by people in other countries in the early days. I believe the only TLDs currently under control of the US government right now are .us and .mil.
NATO has its own TLD as well (.nato). I don’t know why.
Isn’t .gov under US government control as well?
Oh yeah.
Yes, there is a US government registrar that handles MIL and GOV and GOV is supposed to be restricted to US federal government sites. Of course, these rules have been followed about as well as the restrictions in other TLDs and there are lots of state and local government sites running on GOV domains (which belong in the US TLD).
It would be nice if the original intent of the system had been followed: COM for commercial enterprises, ORG for non-profits, NET for network infrastructure providers, EDU for four-year degree-granting universities (or their foreign equivalent), etc. The perceived shortage of domain names in the nineties led to a relaxation of the rules and there are lots of sites running as ORGs and NETs which don’t belong. Pity…
Could be true, but the web was invented by an Englishman working in Switzerland.
Can I have my ball back please?
The web is rather useless without a network to run it upon, Tapioca. 
Forget the .orgs and .nets that don’t belong. My biggest top level domain pet peeve are the following:
www.marines.com
www.airforce.com
www.gocoastguard.com
NO NO NO NO!!!
The branches of the US Armed services are NOT commercial enterprises!!!
All of those should be .mil addresses, or at the very least, .gov.
…but without the user-friendly front-end called the World Wide Web, the Internet would still be languishing in a handful of government and academic institutions, used only by geeks and scientists.
Oh what a world that would be, too. 
You know how quickly some guy would buy “goarmy.com” and turn it into a porn site?
The US Army has army.mil, which it uses for boring-ass military crap. Goarmy.com is a recruiting website, which, while not strictly commercial, is certainly selling something. Also, most people don’t know what the hell .mil is, and would probably type www.goarmy.mil.com into their browser.
That’s funny, I see commercials for every one of those all the time.
.com is not for commercial entities; it was originally designed as a catch-all for people who didn’t fit into the other classifications. Granted, it was primarily taken over by companies, but there’s never been any rule about who could get a .com address.
Doesn’t com actually mean commercial?
.edu is also controlled. Unlike .org or .net or .com.
The problem with this is the .com is the only one people remember. So the others aren’t of much use. And it is a good way to get people to buy .net .com .org (yahoo.com,.org or .net all brings up yahoo)
I brought up a thread a while back on why no one is using .biz or .info .museum .name… etc etc. I haven’t seen any one advertise these.
Actually it is.
Among the original big three TLDs - .com, .org, and .net, .com is supposedly assigned to companies, .org to non-profit organisations, and .net to Internet related institutions such as domain name registrars.
You got a cite for that? I could just be crazy but it seems like I read somewhere a looong time ago that .com was short for communications 