Have you ever wondered where the Internet top level domains (TLDs, e.g. .com, .biz) originate from? Well, there’s the ICANN in the US which assigns registrars (companies) per TLD - after some business struggles that is. Have you ever wondered which geek had the cool idea to also have top level domains for Television (.tv), Radio (.fm), and even Perl programmer (.pl) sites? Hmm, checking this question you’ll find that in fact there are no TV or radio-related TLDs, since each two-letter TLD belongs to a country on planet earth (and is thus called ccTLD). The reality however is that nobody really cares much what you do with our new .tv or .fm domain. The funny part on that is the fact that a number of those two-letter domains are from countries you have never ever heard of before, and those countries made a significant (and unexpected) revenue out of this, financing for example their fee for becoming a member of the UN (link missing).
Countries with such favorable TLD names are for instance
- .tv - the island nation of Tuvalu -> used for ‘Television’
- .fm - the Federated States of Micronesia -> used for Internet radio websites (’frequency modulation’)
- other similarly used ccTLDs are .am, .cd, and .dj
- computer geeks often reserve .pl (Poland/Perl), .cc (Cocos Islands/C++), .tk (Tokelau/Tcl-Tk), or .py (Paraguay/Python)
Finally there are now numerous so-called “Domain-Hacks“, i.e. stragely-named domains registered solely for the purpose of making a pun of words and having the dots in the URI in funny positions. The most famous of those is probably the del.icio.us website.
Is this all a sign of good etiquette? Well, maybe not, but it’s fun and hey, it’s the Internet, so feel free!
