this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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That's a great question and the answer can be found in the wikipedia entry for the .uk domain.
In a nutshell the volunteer "Naming Committee" setup back in 1985 established a rule that entities needed to register into specific subdomains based on entity type such as .co, where the .co part stood for "Company". They did this to make managing registrations easier and to provide an "at a glance" way to see what kind of website you were visiting (commercial, government, charity, etc). The "Naming Committee" was extremely strict about ensuring that domains were registered to a specific entity and in the correct subdomain.
By the mid-90s the volunteer "Naming Committee" was entirely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domains being registered so that volunteer group was replaced by Nominet UK. Nominet didn't open the .uk TLD to registration until 2014 and by then the subdomain thing (.co.uk) was so embedded into the United Kingdom's internet structure that it had become tradition and NOT using was confusing to many people.
There's more subdomains than just .co as well and both wikipedia articles I linked list them.
tl;dr .uk absolutely exists in the UK, it's just used differently than almost anywhere else in the world.
Canada uses gc.ca for federal government sites, and I think every province gets their own, too, like .bc.ca (but I don't know if they all use them.)
I didn't know about Canada and after thinking about it for a minute the United States does something similar for the States with .gov. Many, if not all, States have their own subdomain such as wyo.gov, montana.gov, and nebraska.gov.
Honestly it's always seemed wrong and somewhat confusing that non-country specific TLDs, such as .gov, are dedicated to the United States.