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by Karellen 1206 days ago
That always trips a lot of people up because .uk is the country-code top-level domain for Great Britain, and cctlds are assigned using the 2-letter ISO country code for that country.

...except for Great Britain, who were one of the first few other countries to be connected to the internet, and decided to use .uk before people realised that every country would need one, and using already-assigned ISO codes would be the best way to hand them out.
2 comments
peteri 1206 days ago
Partially this is because the Joint Academic NETwork (JANET) in the uk used addresses in the form of xyz@uk.ac.qmc.cs according to wikipedia the JANET NRS had uk as the top level prior to dns adopting ISO codes in 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS
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netsharc 1206 days ago
Huh? The country is called "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", or the UK for short. Strictly speaking, if you talk about Great Britain, you're excluding Northern Ireland, but politically GB isn't a country...

Wikipedia says "Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean", although historically there was also the Kingdom of Great Britain.

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Symbiote 1206 days ago
Letters like K for kingdom are generally avoided in codes, since this way a change of constitution to the Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland doesn't require a new code.
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Karellen 1206 days ago
Well, go complain to ISO then, not me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes...

Edit: Also, if you've ever seen UK teams compete in international sports, all their athletes have "GBR" on their team uniforms.

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zinekeller 1206 days ago
Yeah, GP is shooting the messenger. If the GP is reading this, here is the address of the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency:

  ISO 3166-1:2020: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 1: Country code
  ISO 3166-2:2020: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 2: Country subdivision code
  ISO 3166-3:2020: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries
  
  Maintenance Agency
  
  ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency
  c/o ISO Central Secretariat
  BIBC II
  Chemin de Blandonnet 8
  1214 Vernier
  Switzerland
  
  Tel: +41 22 749 01 11
  E-mail: customerservice@iso.org
  Website: www.iso.org/mara/iso3166
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