@Jamie Jones
So any international company that wanted to sell to people in the UK would need a .co.uk, and if they only had a .com people in the UK would assume they don't do business there?
The web address is unimportant, I'll bet most people who want to go to apple.com to look at iPhones just type 'apple' in their address bar. If there was already an apple.com back in the day and Apple was forced to use 'applecomputer.com' it wouldn't matter today. The address bar search would direct them to where they wanted to go.
These days some local companies have pretty ridiculous URLs because if your business was called "Johns Refrigeration" there could be a hundred of those worldwide. So if you assumed your local guy got "johns.com" or "johnsrefrigeration.com" you'd be wrong - unless you live in Arizona.
In Chicago maybe your guy is "johnsrefrigerationchicago.com" if you're lucky (and want to type all that) but you'd find it isn't and have to search anyway. Even if there was a TLD "refrigeration" there could still only be one johns.refrigeration so that doesn't help you. If there was a TLD "chicago", there could be only one johns.chicago and it might be a pizza joint or clothing store. Internet search (assuming it isn't gamed by SEOs) solves the problem better than anything else so far.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
