I'll confess I have successfully registered a locality domain this year (2025) and it was a little bit fun to go through the weird hoops to get this new domain registered.
I'm also working on/helping out a registrar whose owned died and his widow is resolving what to do with the non-profit.
A related quaint couple of blogs[1][2] if you're feeling nostalgic and motivated to register your own:
[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq...
[2] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZ...
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":
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...
It's no different to administer than if they had oslokommune.no.
(Just like dealing with bbc.co.uk is no different to administer than bbc.com.)
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.
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!
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
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).
https://www.gatech.edu./ does seem to work for me.
It is interesting that URLs often contain two hierarchies in opposite directions:
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.
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.
Ah, what happened to the site design? It used to have a lovely background and monospace text.
I have never seen this, but I just tried it and it seems like browsers, even today will happily handle such URLs.
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.
But I agree, it’s definitely neat :)
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 :)
Fortunately they seem to be one of the few (only?) providers who does that. So use another DNS provider and Letsencrypt and you’re good to go.
Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so?
Scortched Earth?
Library ditched it for hclibrary.us though. Used to be able to telnet to the catalog at pac.hunterdon.lib.nj.us
eg: www.ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us
Having them as basically US-only just reeks of American exceptionalism which most of the world finds very distasteful.
I don't see why a non-western military alliance wouldn't be eligible, so long as the meet the criteria — treaty registered with the UN etc.