• flashgnash@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        That’s a horrible thing the British government have done

        I’m not sure that’s a good reason not to use the domain though, if we didn’t use anything that horrible people had a hand in making we wouldn’t be talking here right now

        • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          As I understand it, this isn’t a resolved conflict in the past but rather an ongoing one. So yes, it does matter if you decide to give an oppressive British company or the Taliban money. And apart from that, as a German, I’m very much aware that we are not responsible for the wrongdoings of our ancestors but are responsible not to forget and thus repeat them. People who were victims under colonialism or any other form of oppression deserve at least recognition and compensation. Just continuing to live with the current condition shaped by oppression means supporting the oppression.

          • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            By living in the UK I am giving the British government money, there’s not much I can do about that short of moving to another country

            Unless the people who conquered that island and are keeping it conquered are also the ones directly responsible for the domain name?

            And if they are are they really keeping that area under control just for the extension? Can’t imagine it makes nearly enough money to pay for the military occupation there

        • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          They’re two separate(ish) issues.

          But it’s still a bad idea to use national TLDs for stuff that has nothing to do with that nation.

          Granted, is ICANN wasn’t just a money-grabbing machine with no forward thinking they wouldn’t give nations clearly “generally desirable” gTLDs, but since they did already that doesn’t mean they should be misused.

          • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            It’s really frustrating in general how TLDs have been misused and abused over the years. They used to have very specific meanings and usages. Now anyone can register a .net or .org, and don’t have to prove they’re a network service provider or a non-profit.

            People also forget that URLs designate a hierarchy, reading from right to left. For example, take the URL app.foobar.com This designates

            . -> There’s an understood period at the end that’s not typed. But it designates the root (or, well, top in this case) of the hierarchy
            com -> The commercial space (hence top level domain)
            foobar -> Company named Foobar in the commercial space
            app -> The app site/service/etc from Foobar

            If you’re using a domain like foobar.tv, you’re saying you’re an organization called Foobar based in Tuvalu. There’s still plenty of restricted TLDs (.gov and .mil e.g.), but everything has been thrown to the wind for the sake of cleverness, and spammers have ruined anything else that’s not .com for your average user. Your personal info site generally isn’t a commercial page, so .com doesn’t make sense. But other gTLDs get blocked by default by so many admins, it’s pointless to try.

          • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Perhaps I just don’t see why countries need their own extensions anyway (other than ones reserved for government websites to avoid scams, but at the point of being available for public use that kinda falls down)

            • master5o1@lemmy.nz
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              1 year ago

              Local companies may have similar names to others that exist overseas.

              To require them to be in a globally common non-regionalised pool of domain names is more likely to increase scam risks.

              Should the various regional companies of the Vodafone brand be forced to have all their world wide customers sign in to a global parent organisation Vodafone.com? Is it not better for the regionally specific customer portal be vodafone.com.au and vodafone.co.uk?

              • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Yeah that makes sense I suppose.

                I still think for the vast majority of io websites I’ve seen they probably wouldn’t clash with any companies that need portals in those regions

                There’s also a large amount of first come first served with domains regardless of what extension they’re using though, if there’s no legislation around who can use what extension I’m still not convinced it’s that big a deal

            • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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              1 year ago

              Because a lot of the content on national TLDs is relevant only for people of that nation. It helps with name clashes and pushes off stuff that doesn’t make sense in any of the more “global” TLDs.

              And for governments, banks and other institutions there should really be some official standard where they pick a single second-level domain and use it for stuff that needs to be secure so anyone anywhere can be sure it’s controlled by the correct entity and not a scammer.