.uk domain suffixes

[Headtime]

All countries have their own top level domain e.g .fr for France and .de for Germany, and websites for like www.aol.fr for example. Why, then, are British websites always .co.uk, .org.uk etc and not just www.aol.uk or www.bbc.uk?

[Hippy]

Well I think it worked something like this. The Internet was initially an American phenomenon, and the .com = commercial .org = non-profit organisation .gov = government etc. TLDs were invented.

When it occurred to them that other countries not only existed, but might like to join the party, and the World Wide Web became a reality they agreed that the United Kingdom was such an important place (like an outpost of America really!) and we were given the same TLDs but demoted behind a new country TLD .uk. At the same time the .com was shortened to .co so as not to confuse anyone. (hahaha)

I think they also anticipated that the UK would generate lots of Web sites so that www.blah-blah.co.uk would not be the same as www.blah-blah.org.uk so we could have many more Web sites. That's why businesses (like the mythical, I hope, Blah-Blah company) now register loads of possible .org, .net, .com, .co.uk, .org.uk and so on and so on. Clever, wasn't it?

[Hippy]

Afterthought:

The site www.blah-blah.com DOES exist and I do not mean any harm to that company by my previous comments. It is a list of sponsored links, but beware, it will try to hi-jack your IE Startpage.

[lisaj]

That is why, Hippy, the convention is to talk about www.domain.com since it's in all TLDs the word "domain" is reserved and cannot be ligtimately used. As for your original answer, you're almost right. The .uk TLD was given to Nominet to manage and they decided to have SLDs of .co, .org, .net and so on rather than direct companies' names within this TLD.