[zurn]

Or too hard - why are they US only?

[anoncake]

What would be the point? How often do you want to make sure you are on a government website without even caring of which country?

[zurn]

It's just a name, doesn't hold any special assurance for most people.

[delfinom]

Until some enemy country starts registering punicode domain lookalikes lol.

[astura]

Because they created it as one of the original TLDs (along with .arpa, .com, .org, .net, .int, .edu, and .mil) for their research network, ARPANET. Later on the Internet was built from ARPANET.

[zurn]

But those others are not US-only, except .mil

[delfinom]

It's the legacy of the internet starting off in the US. The US Government laid claim to .gov. Other countries instead operate .gov.countrytld

[zurn]

Only a handful of countries operate .gov.countrytld, they are mostly named like someoofficename.countrytld.