::shakes fist::
Is the DMV a .com or a .gov? Because it should be a dot gov — but Texas has stupidly put some of their government websites on dot coms.
It’s almost as if TLDs are completely arbitrary.
This is anarchy!
It’s almost as if ICANN doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing anymore!
ICANNT
The secret is ICANN never has known what the fuck they are doing.
Hilariously, I bet it’s because their Active Directory domain is the same as their public domain, and it becomes a massive pain in the ass to hostname the root domain. Yes, externally you can do it just fine, but then it’s not consistent internally on their private network.
One solution is you run IIS (or any other web server) purely as a permanent redirect for the internal host, but it would then need to run on each domain controller which brings its own set of issues.
My favorite is sometimes when I’m on hold the announcements tell you to visit their website for faster service (would if I could have!). It reads out the URL to you like “double-you double-you double-you dot this stupid company dot com. Again, that’s double-you double-you double-you dot this stupid company dot com”
And if you actually type the “www”, you get redirected to the base domain without it.
I remember listening to radio commercials in the early days where it was:
Aitch-tee-tee-pee colon, forward slash, forward slash, double-you, double-you, double-you, dot nameofthecompany dot com, forward slash, tilde - you know, that squiggly line on the key to the left of the number one on your keyboard, you have to press shift for it - and then the word ‘customer’.