In Sweden, my home country, the se TLD became the de facto default for local companies, or the Swedish branch of international companies. Using an se domain jus

In Sweden, my home country, the se TLD became the de facto default for local companies, or the Swedish branch of international companies. Using an se domain just seemed like the correct choice for a Swedish site. I'm guessing it's for practical reasons to begin with. It was probably much easier to deal with the local registrar, for example. Payments and the registration process were not as simple or fast as they are today. RFC1591 may also give a hint: "This domain has grown very large and there is concern about the administrative load and system performance if the current growth pattern is continued. Consideration is being taken to subdivide the COM domain and only allow future commercial registrations in the subdomain." https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1591 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1591