Oh – I guess my adblocker was blocking GoDaddy’s parking page.
I would argue that its an international TLD, while .us is an American TLD.
If only the US government agreed.
1 Like
It isn’t a TLD specifically for American use; but for the purposes of deciding whether a French court ordering a domain to be transferred from one party to another the fact that “.com” is the behavior of some nameservers operated by a Delaware corporation in agreement with a California corporation, with disputes concerning the agreement to be settled in a Los Angeles County court if it comes to that, mean that it’s a pretty American TLD.
It is the case that ICANN hasn’t been involved specifically at the behest of the Department of Commerce since 2016, so it’s slightly less American than it used to be; but signs of French jurisdiction are still pretty slim for this TLD.
That may change. Don’t forget that Trump wanted to “take back the Internet”. Some day someone will remind him of that.
Trump: “Hey! Why my Twitter no work?!”
3 Likes
I suspect that he’ll find some way to really fuck it up; if only because a relatively boring technical change behind the scenes wouldn’t be nearly what he would be looking for, so something would have to be theatrically broken if only for effect.
That said, I still haven’t figured out exactly what was suffering under Uncle Sam’s hegemonic despotism up through 2016; or what cool multilateral changes have occurred thereafter: IDNs were already being worked on in 2008 or earlier; and (for both good and ill) it was, is, and is likely to remain, your ISP(or someone a step or two above the food chain from them) that actually exercises the control against a given internet user, barring only the atypically sophisticated and evasive. They control the DNS you are likely to actually be chatting with(as well as all your traffic, if you try to get fancy).
I’m not really sure what would be different if the Department of Commerce had retained their official control over the operation.
Jean Baudrillard once proposed that all of America is Disneyland (a simulation of itself, or something like that IIRC), so maybe America.com should just re-direct to Disney.com and be done with it.
In 2016, the Harvard Political Review published a short essay (because of course they did) asserting the relevance of Baudrillard’s ideas to our current political environment. It’s compelling in a kind of abstract way.
1 Like
Well, it is a very interesting read, thanks for the tip.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
