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/ 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
or.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 twetter tlds that were originally
meant to be used by folks within a
specific country so like auk TLD if you
live in London and they to m a website
for your fish and chip shop but these
country code tlds can instead be used
for other purposes including mapping to
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 DN s 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. Orcs and
whatnot I don't even I don't like those
we'll tell you why the internet
shouldn't work that way right after we
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will get 20% off an annual premium
subscription all the way back in 2013 I
can who you can think of as our internet
overlords decided to officially ban
dotless generic tlds these are t is not
nominally tied to a specific country
like the classic andet or more recent
ones likew workk or crypto but they
weren't banned because I can 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 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 networks
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
email 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 foot long you don't
own sandwiches
Subway hey thanks for watching this
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