Oh I thought you were going the exact opposite direction with that reasoning. A hierarchical url is good because it immediately establishes trust and provenance. Currently I never know whether I’m dealing with a for profit entity pretending to be governmental, or actual government.
To technical people, sure. I don’t think the average person knows about provenance rules of subdomains though and how it’s useful… it’s more just a bunch of symbols they don’t care about.
And we understand the threats here… a very real problem is someone forgetting to renew one of these .org or .com domains (maybe the person that maintains it retired) and a malicious actor grabs it after expiration, stands up a scraped copy, and uses it to collect parking ticket payments or whatever.
I was actually thinking a bit more about the diversity of domain names under .gov, though I realize now that the parent comment I replied to was about .org and .coms. I think you get a bit of those provenance assurances if they are under .gov, as a practical matter it’s harder for malicious actors to own one of those than one under other tlds. And then instead of forcing a strict taxonomy that is mostly for the benefit of the infrastructure maintainers (very enterprise software), there is freedom to use a name that makes the most sense for the target user.
But maybe that is part of the culture?