Take [kahoot.it](https://kahoot.it) for example, .it is a country level domain, and there’s no .com or .gov. How does that work?
Also, websites without a .country ending is assumed to be in the US. So, if it’s possible for a website to not have a .com level domain and the assumption is .us, then is it possible for a website to “not have any domain?”
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The country top level domains are peers of other top level domains like .com and .net. A .com domain has no relationship with the .us top level domain. All domains must use a top level domain.
There’s a company for managing the Internet called ICANN.
It gave a whole bunch of companies (usually owned by countries) the right to end an address with something called a “top level domain”. That is the .it stuff, With that, they can do pretty much whatever they want.
.it was given to some Italians.
You can talk to/pay them to get a web address. They don’t particularly care you’re not in Italy.
A lot of these things were meant to signify countries, but some countries wound up with an initial that just so happened to be related to another concept.
EG Tuvalu isn’t exactly an IT powerhouse, but their country top level domain is “.tv” so for some reason a lot of television companies started registering there.
.com is owned by Verisign in the USA. As much of the Internet grew out of US programs, they hold a lot of the more common stuff.
It’s not uncommon for the countries to have similar policies.
EG, if you asked the Italians for a yourwebsite.gov.it address they’d probably tell you to pick another address.
Anyway all of this gets fed into the computers that transform <whatever>.it into ip address computers use.
The last part of the domain, or probably more accurate the first part is the Top Level Domain, or TLD. It can be almost anything these days, there is no requirement that it be any one particular thing. For each TLD that exists, some company or entity owns it and runs name servers for it and allows domain registrars the ability to be able to sell domains for it.
While it is technically possible to “not have a domain”, its not done in practice on the public internet. You can however do it internally. for example localhost is a “domain” that points to your own device (which is the loopback address of 127.0.0.1). You can make whatever internal domains you want, as long as some DNS server your device points to says “somedomain” exists and tells it which IP to point too, then it can.
Governments don’t directly control DNS, it’s controlled by ICANN – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an American nonprofit organization. Governments are given control over country-level domains, like .it and .us and .gov. You might assume .com means American but it technically doesn’t.
It is possible for a website to not have any domain. It would just use its IP address. That’s all DNS does, as it’s core function, is convert human-readable domain names to IP addresses.
“.it”, is just one of many country specific top level domains. There isn’t a technical need for a second level domain.
There are a handul of top level domains (the last part of a web address, the .com, .net, etc part) that hold specific purposes. .com, net, org, gov, mil, are all very specific things for the most part but a lot of it is becoming less and less regulated.
Most countries have their own as well. .it is Italy, I think? But again, a lot of that isn’t regulated.
After that, a LOT of stuff has been opened up to a free for all. You can’t create your own TLD but a lot exist already, and often are used for businesses to play on words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
Top-level domains get to make their own choices about what second-level domains they allow. For instance, the New Zealand .nz domain originally had a short list of second-level domains like .co.nz, .org.nz, .net.nz and about half a dozen others. If you wanted a .nz domain, you had to get a third-level one under one of the second-level ones. The .nz registrar removed the restriction a few years ago, so now you can have anydomainyouwant.nz
Technically, yes it’s possible for a website to have no domain. You can serve content directly using the IP address of your webserver. https://1.1.1.1/ is a good example, but most of the time you’d be stuck with something unmemorable like https://169.254.404.56 and so no one’s going to visit your site. As a rough analogy: you maintain Contacts in your phone, because it’s easier than memorizing all your friend’s phone numbers.
Top level domains are not as neatly organized as you might expect. They’re actually somewhat messy.
.com is for commercial organizations, not American commercial organizations. It’s also not regulated to stop non-commercial entities or individuals from using it.
It became associated mostly with the US for two reasons: first, the internet originated in the US and some other top-level domains (like .gov) are US-specific. Second, the .us domain was heavily over-regulated and cumbersome originally and saw very little take-up.
Country domains use two-letter codes and have differing degrees of regulation. The UK used to require second level domains – and so you still see .co.uk and .org.uk in common use despite top-level .uk domains being available for years now. Some countries require you to have a local presence while others do not.
Some countries took advantage of their country codes being attractive to foreigners – most notably the tiny island of Tuvalu who lucked out with the .tv suffix. They’ll let anyone have a .tv domain and it brings huge revenue to their economy.
>Also, websites without a .country ending is assumed to be in the US. So, if it’s possible for a website to not have a .com level domain and the assumption is .us, then is it possible for a website to “not have any domain?”
Kind of, but the cost for registering a top level domain is a few hundred thousand dollars. Microsoft have done it (you can try www.microsoft).
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