At some point CIRA (the non-profit that now runs .ca) stopped making that a requirement.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca

There are still rules on who gets priority on names: toronto.ca is the government but toronto.com is a news organization; ditto for canada.ca and canada.com; ontario.ca versus ontario.com; etc.

The three/four-level domains are now generally grandfathered.

For example:

- Oslo https://www.oslo.kommune.no/ the largest municipality in terms of population, and home of Oslo the capital of Norway

- Utsira http://www.utsira.kommune.no/ the smallest municipality in terms of population with just 217 people per 2025.

- Nordkapp https://www.nordkapp.kommune.no/ home of the famous Nordkapp (North Cape)

And there is vgs.no for High Schools.

For example:

- Elvebakken videregående skole https://elvebakken.vgs.no/

- Nydalen videregående skole https://nydalen.vgs.no/

- Foss videregående skole https://foss.vgs.no/

These two and some others are called category domains and are managed by Norid, who also run the .no registry as a whole.

https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#4.-A...

I recall a rather tech-savvy teacher struggling to write his school-board provided email address for students to submit some assignments to.

Was something reasonable until the @firstclass.schoolname.xyzdsb.city.on.ca or some related silliness

https://www.abbotsfordps.vic.edu.au/

https://southperthps.wa.edu.au/

https://perthprimary.education.tas.edu.au/

https://nthadelaideps.sa.edu.au/

https://www.nightcliffprimary.nt.edu.au/

https://www.forrestps.act.edu.au/

NSW uses $SCHOOL.schools.nsw.gov.au:

https://innersydneyhighschool.schools.nsw.gov.au/

And Queensland for some bizarre reason uses "eq" ("Education in Queensland", apparently) instead of the standard "qld":

https://townsvillesouthss.eq.edu.au/

http://shoreviewmn.gov/ should have a dot between the city and the state. they chose some form of human usability over precision. I trust it ever so slightly less, because it is cute before hierarchical.

https://www.mvpschools.org/ formerly https://www.moundsviewschools.org are the domain names for a school district. The fact they chose the P between mv and school (which stands for public) makes it look like phishing or social engineering. It erodes trust in both technical decisions and branding decisions made.

Because domains are hard to read, and people were never taught to read them, we lost out on being able to establish trust because something reads "mv.k12.mn.us" (or preferably us.mn.k12.mv) which is two characters SHORTER than mvpschools.org!

Some redirect. Sask. and Que. break the pattern, but both have various government sites under .gov.sk.ca and .gouv.qc.ca (comme de juste).

Not sure who the “.su” was supposed to appeal to, but they were slightly cheaper than officially licensed ones, which probably helped more than the TLD :)

But I agree, it’s definitely neat :)

For example, if you enter "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com", and your search domains contain one item called "mycompany.tld", then the browser will first query DNS servers for "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.", and when an NXDOMAIN is returned, they will try "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.mycompany.tld." next. If you type "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com." in the browser directly, only the first query is attempted.

It's not like it's archaic. You still use the trailing dot when setting up DNS records to ensure they're unambiguous.

When you don't use a FQDN, your DNS system is going to try to figure out if you mean a FQDN or actually belong to a subdomain.

On *nix, your /etc/resolv.conf file can have a "search" entries for search domains... that means that a lookup for "foo" will check "foo.bar.com" if "search bar.com" is in your /etc/resolv.conf

This does mean your query could end up making multiple queries to determine if you meant foo. OR foo.bar.com

You can configure how the machine makes the guesses with something called ndots... if you add "ndots 3" to your etc/resolv.conf, then your DNS queries will only try treating the domain as a FQDN if it has at least 3 dots... so for example, it would skip querying for foo as a TLD because it has no dots, and assume you mean "foo.bar.com", saving an unneeded DNS query.

This usually doesn't matter to people, but it can have big performance implications for things like Kubernetes, with lots of .svc.local bits being left off of internal queries and relying on search domains; by increasing the ndots, you avoid a ton of wasted queries.

Scortched Earth?

I don't think so. Godaddy won't delegate new third level domains, and I don't think the second level (states) were ever delegated?? But if you can find a city.ca.us that is delegated and that person/organization is willing to register a new name, you could maybe do that.

if you reverse the backwards part you get

https://org.myorg.something./something/more/specific/

the dots separate computers or networks and the slashes separate folders.

The problem of having two hierarchies in opposite directions means that it is advantageous to store it while reversing one of the hierarchies. I think the earliest Google Search backend used a format like org.myorg.something/something internally. This representation worked great for key-value storage systems where the keys are sorted.

My community college was occ.cccd.edu when I attended, where cccd.edu was the community college district, and they had registered their domain in 1993, but now the individual colleges have their own domain names, registered in 2002, 2004 and 2007. But there definitely was a time where only 4 year schools and museums were getting new .edus