jeez. people should absolutely know better because the ccTLD is for Mali, a somewhat unstable central African country. who cares what the letters alternatively stand for? Any website built on this is already on a shaky foundation.
If you live outside of the US, yes quite a lot. That's what cctld's are for, the weird part you are observing is that nobody in the us seems to want to use their cctld.
That's obviously because we view .com as our primary cctld, not .us. The .com tld has been the common commercial domain space for the US since long before the Web existed and long before you could freely register .us domains.
Why would we switch over to primarily utilizing .us given the very early adoption of .com in the culture and economy? It would be nonsensical to do so.
You can see that early adoption well represented here:
I think they mean less private for-profit companies, and more NGOs, little municipal-government projects, and the like. The types of things where it's natural to get your city's or state's official registry to nest your project under their namespace.
In Canada, all our federal-government stuff is under .gov.ca, and all our provincial-government stuff is under .gov.[province].ca. But those .[province].ca domains can also be used by any org located in the province, that asks the province nicely. (Examples: http://www.bccancer.bc.ca/, https://spca.bc.ca/)
This same pattern is, AFAIK, followed by pretty much every other country. .gov.[province/state/region].[country] reserved for the regional governments; .[province/state/region].[country] available upon request to orgs that make sense to be nested there.
I understand that the US uses .gov for its federal-government stuff; but why is e.g. the Legislature of Idaho at https://legislature.idaho.gov/ rather than being at e.g. legislature.gov.id.us ? Why weren't swathes of the .us ccTLD reserved for this use, to mirror what basically every other country does with its ccTLD?
However, state governments don't have to use this if they don't want to, and they're allowed to have .gov domains. Different states made whatever decisions for whatever idiosyncratic reasons. I strongly suspect that .gov has better name recognition as "this is definitely the government" among the American public, so that might be a reason why state and local government entities might choose to use it.
To nitpick slightly, most Canadian federal government websites are under .gc.ca, not .gov.ca. For example, pm.gc.ca and travel.gc.ca. But the top-level federal government website is located at Canada.ca (gc.ca actually redirects there).
The fact that you view an international space as belonging to the US is precisely what's weird and objectionable. Most countries don't do that sort of thing and most intranational companies are happy to use a domain from their own country, except for the US.
(Most of your list are multinational corporations which is a perfectly reasonable use for .com).
It is also widely used for non-USA domains (I put my own there as there is lower risk of .com-wide problems - see recent .org attempted hijacking and .weirdtopextensions are very risky)
My point. There's 300+ ccTLDs, or 250+ if you only count ASCII ones. There's maybe about a dozen regularly "misused" ones. (.tk is actually the largest ccTLD, but the rest of the top 10 is normal)
It helps that .ca domains are not available for all. As an individual, you need to be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to purchase one. For companies, they need to have presence in Canada.
> who cares what the letters alternatively stand for?
Lots of people, in fact the letters don’t even need to stand for anything they just become part of SV tech culture and spread from there. For example look at all the tech companies that utilize .io without any real reason. Or from an eastern perspective .cc (cocoa island) has become popular in China because 1. simplicity and 2. repetition is culturally meaningful.
.io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory
The point I was trying to make above ("who cares...") is that you can use any domain you want! You don't need to use a specific ccTLD (.ml would be the example I was referencing) in order to insinuate your machine learning applications.
But I/O is SV culturally derived secondary meaning to .io (British Indian Ocean Territory), there is no reason to have ascribed it. At least with .ly people are incorporating the ly as part of the name like when people register a .in (India) for their cryptocoin project [name]co.in