I love the old interent. I'll confess I have three locality domains and they are wonderful.
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:
Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use.
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.
I love the old interent. I'll confess I have three locality domains and they are wonderful.
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://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/
[2] http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html
Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use.
[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...
In Norway we have kommune.no for municipalities.
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...
For dot-ca, it (used to be) historically mandated that you had to use the 'closest' geographic locale for your domain, which is how we got https://transit.toronto.on.ca (which now goes to https://transittoronto.ca).
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.