opinion Should dot-US really be dot-USA?

[Registry Services]

Recently I wrote a blog post on the issue surrounding dot-US switching to dot-USA.

https://names.of.london/press/should-dot-us-really-dot-usa/


Comments welcome



James

 

[Asfas1000]

I thought all cctld's are 2-char long ?

 

[Registry Services]

I thought all cctld's are 2-char long ?

right - did you read the article?

 

[Asfas1000]

I just did , and you mention that. Why should the uniformity of the cctld's be broken ? It's probably more of a matter of taste. That said, I would prefer .us over .usa.

 

[Registry Services]

I just did , and you mention that. Why should the uniformity of the cctld's be broken ? It's probably more of a matter of taste. That said, I would prefer .us over .usa.

For all countries there is both a ISO3166-Alpha2 and ISO3166-Alpha3 - ICANN have said they will never release the Alpha-3 as a gTLD, so why not just release them all to the Countrys as alternative ccTLDs. There are already a load of non-LL ccTLD domains - mostly in non-latin characters. But there are also a lot of non-LL pseudo-country TLDs, like dot-WALES, dot-SCOT & dot-CYMRU - so the "uniformity" of LL ccTLDs is already "broken".

I suspect most countries would not use their Alpha-3 code as most of them are pretty meaningless - I've listed a few in the document that are quite interesting.


As the document says, given the size of the USA (& internet penetration ratios), and the relative lack of names in dot-US, I would suggest most people don't really like dot-US, and (I suggest) dot-USA would be more popular.

But that's just my 2c worth, and the point of the article was to initiate discussion.

So here's a slightly different way to ask the question - of all the TLDs that currently don't exist, what do you think would be the one that would get the most registrations.

I reckon dot-USA would be a pretty good bet for that. What would you choose?

As you can see Rick "Domain King" Schwartz agreed with me.

 

[Kate]

.us didn't take off for several reasons, already discussed at length here.
Among the reasons is the fact it was released late to the public (2002) and .com is dominant. Also, the US is in a unique position as it 'owns' several other extensions: .mil .gov and .edu is mainly American. So unlike other countries, the US cannot be 'mapped' to just one ccTLD.

Bottom line, releasing another TLD or let's say sTLD like .cat, wouldn't be successful. It's too late now that the landscape is set, and that's why nTLDs are struggling. People either go with .com or ccTLD, or both.

As for the geoTLDs like .wales or .berlin I don't think any of those are really successful, as they are competing against powerful national extensions.
.cat may be doing better but it's because it wants to break away from Spain and .cat is the next big thing to .ct. Understandably a lot of people there are eager to distance themselves from Spain and .es.
However, what I have seen in Barcelona is that .es is used most often, followed by .com and then .cat. So .cat gets some use but it's often by official bodies. I have noticed the same with other geoTLDs. It appears that official/public entities are pretty much the only visible end users.

Back to the US: we now have .nyc. Again I don't think it is really meaningful. Even though NYC is big and has an identity of its own, it can only be a niche extensions.
So there is not point adding thousands of strings that nobody will use for anything serious.

 

[Furquan]

Whatever it be, I don't like it all, Why? I can't get it. I am .outsider!

 

[Branko Jovanovic]

The main prospect at the moment with ccTLD is to bring more domain options for local business. For domestic audience .usa just might be the more attractive option. Rather than switching, I think it would be better to have both options open, since there are some .us websites that would have to communicate the change to their clients who want to revisit, or lose them or their branding if their domain name is a word hack.