Good comment by "twitter" (who even has a bird avatar) in response to the Rhizome top-level-domain article:
For the American registrant, domain names are historically apolitical and more of a fashion thing. It's startling to an American, to whom .com is little more than a suffix, when a TLD exercises some arbitrary rule over who gets domains. For instance -- Domains ending in .uk are not available, only .co.uk. Domains in some countries require a domestic tax ID or local agent (Russia is an example). .Edu requires you to be an educational institution (but this was not always the case). .Cat is only available for people who speak Catalan. And so on.
The American's grasp of geography is tenuous. Can you find Tuvalu on a map? Or Niue? Does .ch correspond to China or Switzerland? There is greater danger with dot-art falling into the hands of someone who treats art with a capital A, as opposed to handling it as an empty signifier. Which is more American -- the musty odor of the sacrosanct, or a yearly subscription fee? Which one will let me register golfc.art?
This discussion does not take into account where the TLD's servers will live -- in a dry county or a wet one. .Tv was once administrated by the guy for whom the Android phone is named, and the servers lived in his friend's garage. An amusing anecdote:
"So what are you going to do about Rubin?" Kim asks, referring to a WebTV executive who at one point managed to get administrative control of .tv without the government in Tuvalu knowing about it. ...
1996: "I was scanning the list of ISO 3166 country codes, and I was like, 'Wow! TV!'" An online database, though, showed that IANA had given administrative authority for .tv to Andrew Rubin, manager of communications software for WebTV. But Kim noticed something he thought was strange: No .tv names were being sold. So he called Funafuti. "I got in touch with the finance secretary, and I said this guy Andrew Rubin is not maximizing your revenue. And he was like, 'Who is Andrew Rubin?'"
Someone with a clue, whereas most art types are "Anton seems cool, I'm sure we can trust him to run the .art domain better than some stinky commercial outfit and as for whether we need an .art domain I don't know much about computers." As for geographic cluelessness, some forgiveness might be in order if you confuse Tuvalu with Tuva.
