gibbergibber - 2:37 pm on Oct 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

--Maybe because it's such a terrible TLD? Seriously.--

It is a terrible TLD, there can't be more than a few hundred postal organisations worldwide and (as someone said above) most of them don't even use the word "post" in their languages. What is the point of a TLD if hardly anyone wants to use it?

I just don't see the point of these ultra-specialist TLDs.

Even in English-speaking countries people don't remember them anywhere near as well as .com addresses, and as others have pointed out they frequently only work in english and are meaningless in other languages. They may not even be pronounceable in other languages.

The only reason we have website names instead of numbers is to make them easier to remember, and a .post address doesn't do that.

I'd say the same about .aero, .coop, .museum, .name, .travel, .jobs, .pro and .mobi as well, totally pointless, far too specific and they only work in english.

In fact I predict .mobi will become obsolete as more and more phones get PC-quality browsers (the most popular smartphone platform, Symbian S60, has had a PC-quality browser for a couple of years now, and the iPhone recently launched with one). This happened to WAP sites, lots of fanfare but hardly anyone used them, and they were soon rendered obsolete by the ubiquity of simple HTML browsers.

The domain name system in the UK has all kinds of silly second level domains including .me.uk (yes, me as in myself), .police.uk, .parliament.uk (why not just parliament.gov.uk?), .mod.uk (the ministry of defence, why not just mod.gov.uk?) etc etc. I really hope the TLD system doesn't go down this route.

--I am starting to believe most new TLD sponsorships are investment attempts at gleaning fees from the Fortune 500 in defensive registrations on the new TLD.--

I think you're absolutely right, the first thing the TLD controllers do is hype up how important it is to "get in there first", and people are panicked into buying additional domain names thinking they have to protect their identity.

-- And .com in various languages would be....--

.com is far, far better as an international domain. It's short, it's easy to remember, it's relatively easy to pronounce in many languages, it doesn't mean anything specific in any language, and many languages contain words related to COMmerce, COMpanies or COMputing which make it easy to remember.

[edited by: gibbergibber at 2:49 pm (utc) on Oct. 6, 2007]