[geographomics]

It's not completely arbitrary, it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries. So on the contrary, it was a very deliberate assignment of two letter codes to territories.

If the islanders had not been forcibly displaced in the 1960s, they would most probably have been had some say in the governance of .io, as other British overseas territories have done for their respective domains.

[rustyfe]

That isn't what he said was arbitrary though. The argument was that the pairing is arbitrary. So there's a justifiable reason why this island would have the .io TLD, but no justifiable reason why that is also an acronym for Input/Output. There's no particular reason .tv is Tuvalu and also Television. It just worked out that way and some acronyms are more valuable than others.

[dingaling]

> it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries.

The mostly is significant; in several cases the ISO was over-ridden and arbitrary but sensible codes assigned e.g. UK instead of GB. Many smaller territories were not granted codes in ISO3166 and had to be 'invented' for the TLDs

ISO3166 is in itself a bit of a mess, and since it became used for TLDs there have been dozens of requests for changes and additions based on new TLD assignments.

[M2Ys4U]

.uk was the first ccTLD, and the assignment precedes the decision to use ISO-3166