Well for one because ccTLDs aren't divorced from their governments - that's the entire point of a ccTLD. The way it usually goes is that the country's governme

Well for one because ccTLDs aren't divorced from their governments - that's the entire point of a ccTLD. The way it usually goes is that the country's government (or occupying force; the actual ccTLD designations follows an ISO list and a long set of complicated resolutions for contested countries, which means that if a country is successfully occupied, the occupier gets the ccTLD. Similarly, country changes also result in the "new" country getting the ccTLD right. This has happened with .su for example, which is controlled by Russia.) has the right from ICANN to use the TLD as they see fit. Theoretically, the ICANNs usual rules apply to domain names however they just get forwarded to the technical admin who can just discard all of the rules with often little consequence. Usually what this results in is the domain getting either ran by a state level technical administrator (you'd be surprised how often this happens) or it gets licensed out to a different technical administrator. The technical administrator then either handles domain registrations themselves or further permits licensing registrations to other registrars (you usually don't buy from the technical administrator directly if they do this). For Belarus, they licensed it out to Reliable Software, a local Belarussian company. This usually means that Reliable Software has to pay the Belarussian a fee to keep operating the registrar, otherwise it'd be put up for sale. That means that the Belarussian government gets direct kickbacks from people purchasing domain names. (For other countries, this can be quite the reliable source of income as well, although .by isn't heavily used.)