Why is BBC promoting a new, root URL "bbc.com"?

For my business I have several domain names including a dotcom one... back in 99 it was the search engines that preferred the dot com domains...

But there is also the fact that if I'm guessing at a domain name I will usually start with dot com and then try the country specific one...

The advantages of having a country specific as well as a com domain name is that you can easily grab who ever is looking for your web site easily...

I even have a couple of domain names with common misspellings of my business name!!

It has been stated quite often that the USA should have their own domain extension such as dot us and leave the dotcom for international users.

John.

It has been stated quite often that the USA should have their own domain extension such as dot us and leave the dotcom for international users.

It comes down to in the 80's we used ascii so capitals were extra code. Hence the lower case letters in internet protocols. We started using phone lines and groups of phone lines (hyper channel) to send data. (pre 80s)

.com, .edu, .gov, .org were borrowed from file extensions and added on domain names to substitute for IP address routing codes when you logged on to a ftp site so you would have an idea of what you were getting into. We (as in the computer community) had no idea our little data libraries and shared programs would go mainstream into everywhere. There was no internet but lots of intranets that if everything worked you could dial up and log onto. Our communications room at one company looked cooler than the original StarTrek bridge and had 200 programmers on line and at least 2 city offices online in each of the lower 48. Connected to the rest of the world? At 9.6 baud CCAANN YYOOUU HHEERREE MMEE NNOOWW?????

Sorry we did our best to kind of standardise in house, another organization's intranet computer(s) my not be able to talk to yours and had different needs and syntaxes. When the system went overseas (the web) country codes were added to show other than North America. A non domestic site. You could expect things to take longer to connect and route.

If it is any consolation logging into a non domestic system was like bouncing a low power short wave to see how far you could make a connection. My first log onto the modern WWW was not until the mid nineties. Mainframes on the other hand was at work. Protocols just grew out of a mix of standards and the rest of the world was added as an extension.

Brad

Hi april05,

Why don't you e-mail them and ask that question, I contact them on a weekly basis to complain of certain programs or to give them information.

Spencer.

Hi Spencer,

Thanks for the suggestion.

You're right - I could give them an ask - they usually respond pretty quickly to questions. I'll give that a try.

However, I thought I'd also seek out a non-BBC perspective on this from the thoughtful global engineering/software community that posts here in CR4.

-April05

The BBC World Service and World TV are international services so .com is more appropriate than .co.uk for an international audience. The website is the same whichever extension you choose, however the version differs according to your location. The default appearance can be overridden so for example international users can default to the UK version if they wish.

its simple than ended by uk. more glable.

Related update: just saw a report on BBC World TV: ICANN is liberalizing its rules again, this time allowing ".anything" in place of .com, .us, co.uk, .biz, etc. New top-level domains can now include ".nyc", ".paris", ".company", or any organizing entity. So maybe BBC is feeling more relaxed about embracing the ".com" (and the implied commercial aspect of that) in sync with ICANN's relaxed attitude. Thought I'd share.