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Why Can't Other Countries Have .gov and .mil?

Posted by Cliff on from the silly-TLD-issues dept.

blurzero asks: "I've been wondering why the USA is the only country that can use .gov and .mil? Why can't a country have it's own .gov and .mil domain names? It seems very unfair to me. " Honestly, I think it's high time that both of these TLDs were dropped and .gov. and .mil. implemented instead. Of course, I think that the entire TLD scheme should be rethought, but that's just me.

1 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. It's all historical.. by mpk · · Score: 4

    All of this stuff is to do with history. Back in the days before the DNS became international, the US government ended up using .mil and .gov for US military and governmental institutions, in the same way as .edu is still almost entirely confined to US educational institutions. As the DNS expanded and country-level domains started being used, com., org. and net. became international in scope, but mil., gov., and edu. remained US-specific.

    The us. domain just didn't take off, which is a shame - if it had, attitudes all over the net would have developed differently and, to my mind, the DNS wouldn't be in the toilet to the extent it is right now as a better structure would have evolved. Because of this, we're left with the flat-file mess of .com and the fundamentally erroneous "everything's in .com" attitude you find all over the net. We're also left with this bloody stupid practice of selling "popular" .com names for absurd amounts of money, which is just.. completely unnecessary and ridiculous.

    Other countries generally keep their governmental institutions under their own country-level TLDs. For instance, the UK has gov.uk and mod.uk for governmental and military domains respectively. There's just no need to put them in the top-level gov. and mil. domains too. It also has the advantage that there's no central authority delegating _all_ the world's governmental and military domains.

    In summary - .com, .net and .org are international in scope, but .gov, .mil, and .edu are US-specific domains which probably should have been assimilated under us. at some point in the past but weren't. Confusing? Right. It's all legacy stuff.