why do websites have different endings (com, net, org) what do they mean?
In: 132
.com signifies a commercial/companies website.
.org signifies a non-profit/charity’s website.
.net signifies a communication/networking website.
at least, thats how it originally was. Now with a lot of domain registration you can pick lots of different ending, so the ending having “meaning” has kind of been diluted.
Rewind back to the very early days of the internet, when it was mostly academic institutions that decided to connect themselves together so they could share information and email. They decided that it would be useful to give connected sites a label, so that as people communicated with one another, or downloaded information from somewhere, they could tell who (or what) it was they were downloading from… So the “top level domain” was born.
.edu was for educational institutions.
.gov was for government.
.mil was for military
.com was for commercial organizations
.org was for non-profits.
…. And then each country got their own TLD as well……. .us for United States, .au for Australia, .uk for UK, etc. etc. etc…… And back in the original version of all this, you actually had to provide documentation to prove you were what you said you were, in order to use anything except a .com
But.. Now you had a way to rapidly identify what kind of entities you were interacting with.
I suspect if the internet could do it all over again, TLDs wouldn’t exist.. and the entire DNS and URL schema would be made way simpler than it is.. But it’s so baked in now, this is how it will still be working for the rest of our lives.
those are called “TLDs” (Top Level Domains), and they are administered [ICANN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN).
They are the highest levels in the [Domain Name System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name) which allows you to punch in a web address and be directed to the correct [IP address](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address). Generally speaking, website names begin with the smallest unit and work their way up to the biggest (after the www.). So [news.google.com](https://news.google.com) starts with NEWS, which is a section on GOOGLE which is part of the .COM domain.
What do they mean? Well, most of them started out as two letter country codes like .US, (guess who that is!), .RU (Russia) and .CH (which is Switzerland, of course), but others have theoretical meaning. ,EDU should be reserved for educational institutions for example, where is .COM is for generic “commercial” sites. Fun fact: .tv is actually the TLD of Tuvalu, a country in the Pacific!
Its just a different “kingdom” of website/domain classification thought up as a means to govern and organize content on the internet. The original idea by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (the internet “gods” in charge of such things) was that each “top level domain” would contain websites and email resources that were particular for a certain “type”. For example, .edu would only be schools, colleges and universities. .com would only be for businesses. .gov would be for governments (the US one in particular). There would be TLDs one for each country (.ca, .us, .nz etc.).
Each TLD would be administered and regulated by a designated authority. For example there’s a Department of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure that governs .gov stuff. The pentagon administers .mil addresses.
The idea is that proper functioning of the internet – at least as far as domain names (google.com) and IP addresses are concerned – requires a top down regulation. Of names, of IP spaces – these things need to be controlled top-down so the routers and junk that make the internet work know where to go if they need to ask where send something. So at the top is the IANA (which is a non-profit global organization). Then each TLD administrator and so on. The changes to the domain name system (DNS) that makes the web work flow seamlessly up and down this hierarchy. Otherwise it would be a free-for-all god knows how it would end up.
Now, in practice, administration of this stuff requires its own infrastructure, so in reality a lot of these top level domains are administered by a handful of companies or bodies – Verisign and Donuts Inc. (yeah I dunno either) for example handle a LOT of the non-country specific domains.
Wow… The Internet is now so old that kids don’t know what top level domains are. It’s time for mandatory Internet studies in public school. I’m not being sarcastic here. It’s time for the Internet to become a core educational subject.
A website URL is actually read backwards from right to left, and each bit is used to narrow down the selection. Lets break apart the example [www.reddit.com](https://www.reddit.com)
What this is saying is:
* **com**: This is called the “Top level domain,” and is the most broad way to filter down the website we’re trying to find (besides country entries like “.ca”), and is sort of like asking a broad question like “Is it a plant or animal.” **.com** means it’s a “commercial,” website, as opposed to an organization, govornment website, etc. though these days the distinctions don’t mean much other than **.edu** which is reserved for educational institutions.
* **reddit**: This is just the domain, and tells the browser which website we actually want to go to, sort of like asking “what animal are we talking about.”
* **www**: this is called the “sub-domain,” and is a way of specifying what part of the website we want to access. **www** translates to “world wide web,” which is our way of saying we want to access the public part of the website. Websites might have various sub-domains EX: [www.google.com](https://www.google.com) goes to the search engine, but [docs.google.com](https://docs.google.com) goes to Google Docs.
It’s kind of weird since that part of the URL is read right-to-left, but the **subdirectory** (the part that looks like **/pages/video_player/somepage.html**) is read left-to-right and specifies which folders on the web-server to look in to find the webpage, no different than how you might have your essay saved under **my_documents/college_essays/english_paper_final_edit_final.docx**
To the computers the name make no difference – if it’s .org or .com does not matter at all. It’s a human organization that started with US institutions forgetting that a world outside the US existed but did find that different rules/idea would apply to commercial organizations than to government and hence organized the names so we could have different human processes to manage how names would be allocated.
As the internet has grown this very fixed structure was replaced with a very wide set of names managed by a lot of different organizations from countries and sub-divisions within countries based on what it find necessary. And then there’s all the .info, .news etc. that simply means you have competing companies selling you domain names, which in _theory_ would lower prices. Unfortunately, because TLDs like .com have existed since the inception they often go for a lot higher price – even though it doesn’t matter for how the internet works.
Browsers will try to “guess” the TLD so using a TLD that is known/used by the browser would be helpful, or you as user would have to type the whole name dots and all, for the hostname to be found.
So the TL;DR is that the name indicates WHO manages what domain names can be created. There may be different rules for different TLDs, just like there are different prices.
I think everyone already explained it pretty well, but as a tl dr eli5, remember:
In www.google.com, com is the big folder, then google, then www.
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