• 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)

    • 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?

      • 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

    • 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.