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So everybody knows that internet addresses all have dots in them, except for the ones that don't.

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Wait, what? Fun fact, it's actually entirely possible for a website to exist with zero dots

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in its address. Like these websites, try typing in pn slash or ai slash into your web browser.

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If it doesn't work on your desktop, try doing it on your phone.

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And look at that! A couple of real, actual web pages without a dot in sight. But why?

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You already know that the end of a web address is typically something like dot com or dot net.

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These are called top-level domains or TLDs. No R. They help get you to the website you want,

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but as the name implies, they're still domains, meaning they can, in theory, direct you to a

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specific website on their own if you just typed in something like com or net with nothing else

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attached. The most common TLDs aren't associated with specific web addresses, but there are some

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two-letter TLDs that were originally meant to be used by folks within a specific country,

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so like a .uk TLD if you live in London and need to make a website for your fish and chip shop.

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But these country code TLDs can instead be used for other purposes, including mapping

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two specific websites on their own, like in the examples we gave towards the beginning of this

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video. And for you networking nerds, all you need to make a dotless domain work is to link it to

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something called an address record or an A record that will use the DNS to point the

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dotless domain to an actual IP address and return you a nice shiny web page.

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Why the heck isn't this more common? I mean, wouldn't it be easy to simply type in a word

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or a brand name and immediately get their website instead of dealing with all those

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messy dot orcs and what nots? I don't even, I don't like those.

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All the way back in 2013, ICANN, who you can think of as our internet overlords,

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decided to officially ban dotless generic TLDs. These are TLDs not nominally tied to a specific

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country like the classic .com and .net, or more recent ones like .work or .crypto.

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But they weren't banned because ICANN hates fun or convenience. They had several good reasons.

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The first is that dotless domains actually are already in use, but they tend to be used on

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large internal networks that you might see inside something like a large corporation.

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There's actually a long history of users in these situations expecting a local site,

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not an internet site, to show up. Extending this functionality to the public internet could cause

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a namespace collision. For example, if you expected Netgear to lead to both a private page

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for managing your local network's equipment and Netgear's official website because you

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feel like buying a new router today, your poor computer might not know how to handle that.

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It's a similar issue to why the examples we gave at the beginning of the video

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might work on your phone, but not your PC. And this fact actually highlights an even bigger problem.

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Security. Because people have an expectation of trust when it comes to their local networks,

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it would be very easy to accidentally send sensitive data to a completely different public site

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that has the same dotless domain name. Even aside from that specific risk, many systems are

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configured in different ways to treat local addresses with more lack security. And if your PC

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thinks it's talking to a dotless domain on your local private network, but is actually connected

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to a public domain with the same name, that opens the door to myriad potential security holes.

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And comedic situations. Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that

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dotless domains would largely break emails. You see, email commonly is sent over a protocol

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called SMTP. And SMTP simply isn't built for dotless domains. It can't even understand them.

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So if you try to send a message to an address that looks like this, you'll just get a big fat

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return to sender in reply. So it's really not surprising that when Google tried to make another

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push to normalize dotless domains a few years ago, I can told them to go pound sand. Google wanted

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to do this so they could register TLDs like app and search. So whenever users typed in these words,

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they'd get directed to a Google-owned website. Kind of reminds me of that time, Subway tried to

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trademark the word footlong. You don't own sandwiches, Subway. Hey, thanks for watching this video,

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guys. Like the video if you liked it. Dislike it if you disliked it. Check out our other videos.

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