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Something I’ve always wondered: why is `co.uk` a TLD? What’s the story behind that?

• soneil 5y ago
  It was inherited from JANET pre-DNS, which had UK.AC.FOO for academic and UK.CO.FOO for commercial. So instead of .edu.uk and .com.uk, we kept the established inertia and just flipped the word order. It's also why we ended up with .uk as a ccTLD instead of .gb (as iso3166 would have us use).
  • scrollaway 5y ago
    Thanks for that little story. I always wondered. TIL :)
    • soneil 5y ago
      A few other oddities were born out of this too. For example, major universities using two letters with a full-length alias (eg UK.AC.OX & UK.AC.OXFORD - seeing .ox.ac.uk is still the more common today), and also the British Library ending up outside of a top-level element 25 years before anyone else (UK.BL became bl.uk and british-library.uk). A lot of what's weird in the UK's hierarchy is simply because NRS predated DNS. (Other trivia - NRS contexts did 40 years ago, what SRV is still trying to do today. And a huge number of govt sites still serve their dns records through ja.net, which is a nice nod)
• fomine3 5y ago
  Because only US could make their own "top level" TLDs