Eli5: Why do some nations use an Internet address suffix derived from their English name and others use the native nation name?

Question

IE, why does Japan use .jp and not .ni? While Germany uses .de and not .ge?

In: Technology

Answer 1

The internet suffixes come from an older list of country abbreviations that has been around since the 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1

Using this existing list allowed the people who did DNS to avoid any trouble of having to deal with the politics of what does and does not count as a country or territory.

They let the UN do that.

The codes on that list are mostly derived from the names of the country in their own languages or sometimes in English, especially if their native language isn’t commonly written in the Latin alphabet. Since transliteration of one script into another can vary a bit, the short form may be different from how the countries named is commonly spelled today.

Some exceptions include Switzerland which has three different major language groups and their country code is from neither of the languages spoken there nor English, but from Latin (CH from Confoederatio Helvetica).

Sometimes the most obvious code for a country is already taken by another one that was earlier or simply bigger and more important and a slightly less obvious has been chosen.