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).
Yes, and as such I'm aware that it was not the Silicon Valley-only project that a certain crowd likes to portray it as. The specific implementation of TCP (and indeed DNS) that ARPANET used came from UC, but it's derived from the French CYCLADES project via the INWG. So it was an international effort from the start, and that's even more true for the complex stacks that today's commercial websites run on.
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)
Only in the US or everywhere? I see there are anonymizing services to mask the domain details so that any whois query returns a pointer to their office rather than the effective domain owners. A service that does the opposite might be handy for example to expose spammers.
Anywhere. Yes, there are "whois guard" services, but that's actually email relays (like aliases). You must provide your identity information (name, surname, other passport/id data, address, etc.) to buy a domain name.
Any "privacy-oriented" registrar just hides that information from whois records, but you still share it to registrar, so in case of government requests or data leak your PII will be exposed.
There is no anonymity in internet, only pseudoanonymity.
I have yet to be asked for a passport and I own a few region locked domains (ex. .EU). That said there are anonymous domain resellers that basically register the domains on themself. It's more expensive than the usual free whois guard but it's not unheard of.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...
northrop.com 1985, dec.com 1985, att.com 1986, xerox.com 1986, ibm.com 1986, sun.com 1986, intel.com 1986, ti.com 1986, boeing.com 1986, alcoa.com 1986, adobe.com 1986, amd.com 1986, 3com.com 1986, tandy.com 1986, and so on.