this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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The domain bs is a interesting case of scummy practices in general, .tv was missused in a similar way with awful contracts, essentially scamming a already increadably poor country!
Didn't Tuvalu massively benefit from being assigned a TLD that is popular? I read they were able to build an airport with .tv money
Yea, they managed to get it back at some point but it was under external control with close to no benefit for them for a long time!
They reclaimed many domain rights and are now renting them out for big money, yeah. They were still scammed off by many.
There is also
.iofor the Indian Ocean territories. They seem to be fine with it. It is interesting they have problem with it. I wonder what the actual motivation is, because it can't be due to a lack of viable domain for businesses.The US and UK build a military base and established it with that ages ago so I am not surprised the current population is fine with it but they expelled the original population to do so! :/
TLDs are a non-tangible arrangement of characters that are defined by a committee at a whim. The countries they are given to have not contributed anything to make them worth more. I don't see how that can be seen as a scam when they don't get free money based on a random decision by someone outside of their country.
That's not actually true, the guy who made them originally was from the west and those countries didn't contribute because they had no chance of any digital infrastructure yet but top level country domains use caracters from the correspinding countries name and those are all determind in the same way so you essentially use their name without their permission or based on scetchy and scummy legally binding agreements!
If you tried to trademark any of these tlds, it would fail horribly.
TV, ML, IO etc are literally just two letter combinations and they are descriptive by nature. There is no real way to claim ownership on just two letters, especially when they have an accepted understanding as being geographically descriptive.
If you could do this, concepts such as maps would also be infringement.
Additionally, the IANA is who is in charge of assigning TLDs, which is in turn controlled by ICANN. IANA gets to appoint trustees for country code TLDs and has the authority to take that control back.
IANA is based in the United States(though it has stakeholders globally) and has the authority to revoke TLD (unlikely to happen, but well within their rights and control) and more likely, to re delegate control to another authority, if they found the currently appointed trustee to be abusing the control of the TLD.