So everybody knows that internet addresses all have dots in them, except for the ones that don't.
Wait, what? Fun fact, it's actually entirely possible for a website to exist with zero dots
in its address. Like these websites, try typing in pn slash or ai slash into your web browser.
If it doesn't work on your desktop, try doing it on your phone.
And look at that! A couple of real, actual web pages without a dot in sight. But why?
You already know that the end of a web address is typically something like dot com or dot net.
These are called top-level domains or TLDs. No R. They help get you to the website you want,
but as the name implies, they're still domains, meaning they can, in theory, direct you to a
specific website on their own if you just typed in something like com or net with nothing else
attached. The most common TLDs aren't associated with specific web addresses, but there are some
two-letter TLDs that were originally meant to be used by folks within a specific country,
so like a .uk TLD if you live in London and need to make a website for your fish and chip shop.
But these country code TLDs can instead be used for other purposes, including mapping
two specific websites on their own, like in the examples we gave towards the beginning of this
video. And for you networking nerds, all you need to make a dotless domain work is to link it to
something called an address record or an A record that will use the DNS to point the
dotless domain to an actual IP address and return you a nice shiny web page.
Why the heck isn't this more common? I mean, wouldn't it be easy to simply type in a word
or a brand name and immediately get their website instead of dealing with all those
messy dot orcs and what nots? I don't even, I don't like those.
All the way back in 2013, ICANN, who you can think of as our internet overlords,
decided to officially ban dotless generic TLDs. These are TLDs not nominally tied to a specific
country like the classic .com and .net, or more recent ones like .work or .crypto.
But they weren't banned because ICANN hates fun or convenience. They had several good reasons.
The first is that dotless domains actually are already in use, but they tend to be used on
large internal networks that you might see inside something like a large corporation.
There's actually a long history of users in these situations expecting a local site,
not an internet site, to show up. Extending this functionality to the public internet could cause
a namespace collision. For example, if you expected Netgear to lead to both a private page
for managing your local network's equipment and Netgear's official website because you
feel like buying a new router today, your poor computer might not know how to handle that.
It's a similar issue to why the examples we gave at the beginning of the video
might work on your phone, but not your PC. And this fact actually highlights an even bigger problem.
Security. Because people have an expectation of trust when it comes to their local networks,
it would be very easy to accidentally send sensitive data to a completely different public site
that has the same dotless domain name. Even aside from that specific risk, many systems are
configured in different ways to treat local addresses with more lack security. And if your PC
thinks it's talking to a dotless domain on your local private network, but is actually connected
to a public domain with the same name, that opens the door to myriad potential security holes.
And comedic situations. Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that
dotless domains would largely break emails. You see, email commonly is sent over a protocol
called SMTP. And SMTP simply isn't built for dotless domains. It can't even understand them.
So if you try to send a message to an address that looks like this, you'll just get a big fat
return to sender in reply. So it's really not surprising that when Google tried to make another
push to normalize dotless domains a few years ago, I can told them to go pound sand. Google wanted
to do this so they could register TLDs like app and search. So whenever users typed in these words,
they'd get directed to a Google-owned website. Kind of reminds me of that time, Subway tried to
trademark the word footlong. You don't own sandwiches, Subway. Hey, thanks for watching this video,
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