I don't buy this at all. Country-specific tlds are more or less a total failure. To the extent they still have a role, it is in having official government sites (eg "gov.uk" in the uk)
Firstly the US never bought into it so all the original successful internet companies are ".coms". For this reason if you are a global company, chances are you would prefer a ".com" to anything else. Most companies want to address a global audience and part of the point of e-commerce is to make this happen. So they don't necessarily want a parochial-seeming national tld but would prefer a global one. This makes country-specific tlds redundant for commerce.
Secondly the people running the national TLDs are (in my experience) often doing so to further their own egos and personal interests and so tend to offer a shitty service. This is why I gave up my ".co.uk" domain some years back. The UK NIC were just annoying in a bunch of different ways.
not sure what world you live in, but ccTLDs are widely used across the world, and in a lot of countries much preferred over .com.
german people, for example, will trust a business running on a .de domain much more than a .com one.
in most cases it is much preferred for an international company to run the country-specific website on the according ccTLD. companies that "want to address a global audience" are a specific set of companies that might prefer a "global" website, but most businesses will run country specific sites, not "global" sites.
also not sure what the UK NIC being "annoying in a bunch of different ways" has to do with anything, or even means.
seems to me like you are living in your own world, far detached from reality.
I’m happy to be wrong about this and hear about the thriving ccTLD scene but there’s no reason to get personal and say I’m detached from reality.
The way in which the UK nic used to be annoying that is relevant for this is that they used to make it much harder to register, transfer and renew domains. So at some point even though I had a .co.uk and a .com I just stopped trying to transfer the .co.uk and let it lapse at the next renewal date.
yeah you're right that some registries might have some weird quirks about certain things like transfers or additional mandatory requirements etc.
UK transfers are surely more complicated than they have to be (push vs. pull logic).
and I can also see where you're coming from, since in the UK it doesn't seem to be such a big thing.
but in most other non-english speaking countries (or even .com.au or co.nz), ccTLDs are actually a big trust factor. also for example high-end keyworddomains sell for a multiple of the respective .com domain price. sometimes as much as 5-10 times.
It might be different for the UK, but as others have said ccTLDs in my experience are much preferred over .com. .com is basically used for generic US multinational companies, which means a handful of websites you care about but locally relevant sites are going to be .fr or .be for me.
.fr and .be are as easy to manage as any other TLD, and they have the advantage that you're probably not going to be price gouged as they are not run for profit.
Firstly the US never bought into it so all the original successful internet companies are ".coms". For this reason if you are a global company, chances are you would prefer a ".com" to anything else. Most companies want to address a global audience and part of the point of e-commerce is to make this happen. So they don't necessarily want a parochial-seeming national tld but would prefer a global one. This makes country-specific tlds redundant for commerce.
Secondly the people running the national TLDs are (in my experience) often doing so to further their own egos and personal interests and so tend to offer a shitty service. This is why I gave up my ".co.uk" domain some years back. The UK NIC were just annoying in a bunch of different ways.