That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. Here's an example of how it's used: https://thecity.nyc/

> That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name.

While it is prohibited by the ICANN policy [1], it is not strictly enforced so that there are multiple TLDs with A/AAAA records. They traditionally could be resolved with a trailing dot (thus it is not a dotless host name, that would have no dot), but nowadays many browsers refuse to resolve them without an explicit scheme. But they do still exist: try `http://pn./` for example.

[1] https://serverfault.com/a/907228

This prohibition only applies to gTLDs. It does not apply to ccTLDs.

Aha, thank you for pointing it out---I actually overlooked a very informational RFC that says exactly this [1].

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7085

http://ai./ is a better example.

both pn and ai are giving me DNS errors in chrome on ubuntu.

The DNS server at work (which I maintain... oops) doesn't work, but home and other servers do work:

  host ai. 1.1.1.1
  Using domain server:
  Name: 1.1.1.1
  Address: 1.1.1.1#53
  Aliases:
  
  ai has address 209.59.119.34
  ai mail is handled by 10 mail.offshore.ai.

HN doesn't like your link's formatting. Try: http://www.pn./ or http://www.pn/

This unintentionally makes a point about how hard these domains are to use; they're not supported very well.

The problem is the closing ` is being treated as part of the URL.

Your .pn link doesn't work for me without www part.

At least for https://www.fi/ the case is that someone registered "www" as the domain name in the early days.

Hmm, I guess the current browsers simply don't like such domain and automatically put www. At the very least, the Google DNS gives the following:

    ai. 209.59.119.34
    cm. 195.24.205.60
    dk. 193.163.102.58
    gg. 87.117.196.80
    je. 87.117.196.80
    pn. 80.68.93.100
    tk. 217.119.57.22
    uz. 91.212.89.8
    ws. 64.70.19.33

But I agree that these domains are now out of luck, given that browsers no longer even remotely support them.

I see that the Vatican has given up. Long ago, http://va/ was it. No other name under va existed. Netscape Navigator was able to navigate to that part of the net.

It really did make sense for such a tiny place.

https://nyc.nyc, so good they domain named it twice...

Missed opportunity for ny.ny

Nope, two character TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs, and New York definitely isn't a country.

I mean, someone made some policy that says that... but it would be fun! Do people still have fun these days?

The reasons why these don't work go much belong policy. Let's say that you're trying to advertise city social services in a subway ad campaign; how in the world do you get people to go to just "nyc" as the domain name? I guarantee you most of them will end up just performing a search on "nyc". It simply doesn't work. When you put nyc.gov as the domain name, everyone knows what that is and how to navigate to it.

Secondly, we have the expectation that subdomains of a given domain are run by the same entity, and represent natural semantic subdivisions. E.g. there's google.com, the over-arching website for all of Google and its first major product, and then for its other major products there's maps.google.com, mail.google.com, docs.google.com, etc.

This doesn't work with nyc, because subdomains of nyc are actually registrable domain names all their own that are controlled by other entities. So you can't have nyc be the overarching website for NYC, and then have parks.nyc, housing.nyc, business.nyc, etc., as natural subdivisions of it, because other people can own those domain names! So now you have no great way to subdivide up your site, and other people's sites are easily confusable as yours.

The only real way to do a dotless root DNS website is if you control the entire TLD; it has to be closed and not open to registration by external parties.