I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican, so 'vatican.va' is kind of redundant, they could just use 'va' right? (You might need an 'http://' or a fully-qualifying '.' suffix in a browser, which I suppose is an argument against doing it, but still.)
.va is the ccTLD for the State of Vatican City (equivalent to, say, .uk for the United Kingdom)
vatican.va is the domain used by the Holy See as such. Given the relation between the Holy See and the State of Vatican City, this is very loosely parallel to royal.uk ("The Vatican" is a common metonym for the Holy See)
vaticanstate.va is the domain used by the State of Vatican City (this is like gov.uk)
Several subordinate organizations of the Holy See or the State of Vatican City have their own second-level domains under the .va ccTLD.
There are a handful. https://lab.avl.la/dotless/ has a list of some. Its not allowed for gTLDs, but ccTLDs belong to the corresponding country so nobody has the authority to disallow it for them.
This got me down a rabbit hole. ICANN has a form where you can report a name collision, and if it causes harm to life, they apparently will take action to remove an entry from DNS. I wonder if this has ever been exercised, and if so, I would be curious to hear the story.
> ICANN will initiate an emergency response for name collision reports only where there is a reasonable belief that the name collision presents a clear and present danger to human life.
If you want to talk about redundancy in domain naming conventions look no further. The Falkland Islands ran FIG.GOV.FK for government websites, in the shape of FIG.GOV.FK/CUSTOMS meaning "Customs service of the Falkland Islands Government (FIG), of the government (GOV) of the Falkland Islands (FK)". Even today they dont shake the FALKLANDS.GOV.FK which is again redundant...
But in our case that’s a little bit different from the Canadian one.
Norge.no is a guide to digital public services in Norway. The portal presents services from national and local government agencies.
So it’s a place you might go to find where to go for government services when you aren’t sure where to go to find it. And then you are taken to the actual website for what you are looking for, which will be under its own domain instead of on norge.no
Personally I don’t use Norge.no, I just go more or less directly to the websites for the government services that I am interested in or I find them on Google.
At least for a while dk-hostmaster, the national registry in Denmark was using http://dk as (one of) their domains. Nowadays they're called "punktum dk" (literally "dot dk") and have dropped their TLD redirect.
I think it's generally frowned upon by ICANN nowadays.
.uz (Uzbekistan) resolves by itself, but the server it points to has an invalid cert so you have to click past an error to see it. Still, it's technically a working naked TLD.
www.va tells me “Oops! We weren't able to find your Azure Front Door Service configuration. If it's a new configuration that you recently created, it might not be ready yet. You should check again in a few minutes. If the problem persists, please contact Azure support.”
I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican, so 'vatican.va' is kind of redundant, they could just use 'va' right? (You might need an 'http://' or a fully-qualifying '.' suffix in a browser, which I suppose is an argument against doing it, but still.)