Many multinational companies wish to promote their brands, products and
services world-wide but also provide different services to different
customer segments. This is very common with e-commerce businesses
where their customers are located in different countries, speak different languages
and
have different cultures, values and needs.
To address the needs of an international customer base, companies often
use a combination of generic and country specific TLDs. A good example
of this is Google:
Although the domain names differ, companies can
host their different sites on the same physical web server, on different
web servers in the same location or on web servers in geographically different locations.
In Google's case, each of their websites are hosted on multiple physical
servers in multiple locations.
The company must, however, be able to pass the domain registration rules
defined by the domain registry body for each country specific domain name
that it wishes to purchase.
