From the site "The main goal of EU.org is to provide free subdomain registration to users or non-profit organizations who cannot afford the fees demanded by some NICs." They don't claim to be issuing domain names at all.
And? Since they're on the public suffix list, they might as well be issuing domains. Subdomains work differently in a browser compared to a domain and since the eu.org stuff is handled as domain by browsers I see no issue describing it as such.
eu.org is a public suffix (check the list), which means that every domain below it is treated as it's own seperate security context. Meaning cookies are not shared between domain-a.eu.org and domain-b.eu.org.
If they weren't on the public suffix list, cookies would be shared.
This also affect a myriad of other contexts that the browser applies against the public suffix list.
Technically "com." or even just "." could include a A record with a website. However browsers tend to strip the last "." and treat empty or names without "." in them as search terms.
There exist people who disapprove of this behavior.
A few years ago I tried all two-letter ([a-z]) TLDs and found some others that were able to handle HTTP requests, but they were either just redirecting to another domain name (the ones I noted down back then don't seem to work anymore) or returning 500 errors (http://uz/).
These examples should at least demonstrate that there shouldn't technically be some special case for resolving TLDs. They work in normal web browsers, and presumably a lack of A records for other TLDs would just be some sort of convention.
Since the site is the one that made the title, they are inconsistent in how they describe the services.
One way to define a distinction is to look at liability and legal standing. Do users under eu.org have any rights, and if there is abuse, how much legal liability do eu.org have? To take an example, HN users can be kicked out of here at the whims of ycombinator. TLD's usually don't do that and generally require a court decisions before a persons domain can be taken away (assuming fees have been paid).
They are indeed using the name interchangibly. I guess what I meant to say is they are not claiming to be providing a proper TLD when they aren't. I guess it doesn't matter much in practice and that's why people in this thread are using it interchangibly too.
