Re: .com, .org, .gov, .edu
"Every one of which is overseen by an organisation in the USA. So are they global or not?"
Firstly, people seem to forget .mil, .int and .net
Then, .mil and .gov are both reserved for US government purposes and really should be .mil.us and .gov.us, but they aren't, for historical reasons & backwards-compatibility.
.edu is a special case. It used to be worldwide but was clawed back to the US in 2001, since every other country turned out to prefer registering educational institutions in their own country code. However, it still contains some legacy names like toronto.edu, so it is not US-only.
.com, .org, .net and .int are available for worldwide registrations. So yes, they are global. The registries have to be somewhere, so three of them are in the US and one in Switzerland.
"They are an inconsistency in the naming scheme."
It was once put to me that just as the UK doesn't put "UK" on its postage stamps because we invented postage stamps, the US doesn't need to put .us on its DNS names because it invented the DNS. Yes, there's an inconsistency for historical reasons, but so what?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
