That was introduced in 1985, almost 40 years ago.

For how many decades is this going to be a reasonable argument?

In 100 years, will it still be reasonable for the USA to say "we built the thing, so it is appropriate for us to continue to be the default country in domain names. The rest of you must use your ccTLDs, but we remain special."

In 200 years?

The only non-pathetic option is for the United States to transition to using its .us ccTLD for governmental and military domains in particular, with .edu and probably some others not far behind. The only question is how gradual the process is, and when it starts.

Country calling codes date from the 60s and yet the US (and Canada?) are still +1.

The real answer is that it’s way too much work to change now, so it will probably continue indefinitely unless a new system supplants the current internet.

That's silly; registering new domain names and putting redirects in place is much simpler than changing a freakin' country code.

> That's silly; registering new domain names and putting redirects in place is much simpler than changing a freakin' country code.

Cool, here's a $50,000 firm fixed contract for you to go fix all the hardcoded .gov references in every single federal website, knowing how many of them will fail to handle redirects gracefully.

Why is the change needed?

Here’s the reasonable argument: US citizens are now used to .gov domain names being solely used by US government entities. They won’t change it, nor should they, as forcing domain name changes will simply add confusion for Americans.

Just because you don’t like that the US government has first mover advantage isn’t a good reason to change this.

I don't really think this is much of an issue. It's not like the change would happen immediately. Each .gov website is likely run by different agencies, so they wouldn't end up switching all at the same time.

It's a pretty simple matter to register a corresponding .gov.us domain for each existing .gov domain. Then each .gov domain owner would have to configure their web server properly, and can phase in a redirect from the old .gov to the new .gov.us.

Prior to this happening, the .gov site could have a big banner across the top of the page informing visitors of the change. This could remain for as long as seems reasonable before changing, even multiple years.

> Just because you don’t like that the US government has first mover advantage isn’t a good reason to change this.

As an American, I think the current setup with .gov (and .mil) is super weird. The fact that there are so many US government websites that are under .com, .org, and even .us, is weird too. The US shouldn't hold any kind of privileged place when it comes to TLDs; it's clearer for everyone concerned -- including Americans -- to put all these under .gov.us.

Sunsetting a TLD to prove a point sounds really silly.

MS still hasn't gotten all of their users to transition to outlook.com in order to be rid of hotmail.com, which they bought in 1997.

Do you have the US Government doing it quicker? The only way it ever occurs is if they effectively CNAME .gov to .gov.us to run them both side-by-side.

Adding a new domain and redirecting every old URL is fine, though they may not be prepared to set that up. But that old domain and those old URLs need to redirect forever, because there’s never a day when you can be certain that every old hyperlink on the web and every bookmark anyone ever saved has been updated. Otherwise you are intentionally causing link rot.

https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

The redirects are fine but probably take effort depending on how those backends work. They also need to be permanent to avoid link rot.

Edit: I’ve been in stacks of microservices for a while, and it just occurred to me that I’m not sure how cookies can be migrated between domains.

Until a country decides to use its own dns root. Then another. Then another.

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Why do you think other government/country want to use an English abbreviation for their government entities ? Even for Latin language that use a similar word "gouv" (french), "gob" (spanish) or "guv" (romanian) would be more natural.

Various government departments of those countries use domains under .gouv.fr, .gob.es, .gov.ro respectively. The argument is that fairness and clarity would suggest that the US likewise use .gov.us or some other convention of their choice under .us.

Right, I assumed it was the same principle by which UK, having issued the first postage stamps, is the only country that doesn't say the country name on the stamp.