[adventured]

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:

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.

[derefr]

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?

[ameliaquining]

They were; there's a whole complicated set of namespace reservations for government entities under .us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us#Locality_namespace

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.

[selectodude]

Until recently, non-federal entities weren't allowed to use .gov. So states and municipalities had to actively switch (and advertise that switch).

[csande17]

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).

[beardyw]

> Why would we switch over to primarily utilizing .us

Precisely because .com is used by all the world and his dog. It gives no indication where the organisation presents its home to be.

[zhte415]

Which is why I check the 'About' page on a site new to me.

[bpodgursky]

As a consumer, why do I care?

[lmm]

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).

[hereforphone]

Are you familiar with the history of the Internet?

[lmm]

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.

[iso1631]

Those websites running that Swiss originated hypertext protocol? The one that won because the US protocol (gopher) was monetized?

[TedDoesntTalk]

> an international space as belonging to the US

Do you mean .com or the Internet as a whole?