[gbxyz]

The UN publishes a list of recognised member states. ISO maintains a list of codes. IANA uses that list to determine whether a country code TLD is valid. But that's the extent of the UN's involvement in the governance of the root zone.

[midasuni]

There are plenty of TLDs for areas which aren’t countries, whcih don’t claim to be counties, which nobody recognises as countries. .gg and .gu for example.

[infinityio]

> The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list.

Jon Postel, RFC 1591 (Domain Name System Structure and Delegation)

[notRobot]

Those are not ccTLDs though.

[midasuni]

Yes, they are.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/gg.html

[notRobot]

Oh, I was wrong. My bad.

[infinityio]

are you sure? Wikipedia describes both as being country code tlds, and both have an official ISO 3166-1 code that matches their domain.