IE, why does Japan use .jp and not .ni? While Germany uses .de and not .ge?
In: Technology
ICANN has typically, with a few notable extensions, worked with the ISO 3166-1 country codes for each country. The most notable exception being the UK using .uk instead of .gb as it would have been if consistent with the ISO 3166-1 code (The ISO typically doesn’t use self descriptors like Kingdom or Democratic when deciding country codes)
So it ultimately comes down to how ISO felt the day it was all decided and how much soft power a country has. The Euro countries typically had a lot of soft power in these organizations so they got their country codes in native languages or using traditional names for their countries. For example, Spain is es not sp because the native name for it is España. Switzerland is ch not sw because of its name of Confoederatio Helvetia in Latin which the French, German, Italian, and Romansh speakers could all agree on as a neutral name.
You also need to keep in mind that a lot of countries have conflicting sets of possible short codes. So for instance ni is the ISO country code for Nicaragua. Nicaragua is also the name of the country in the native language so there’s not exactly a good second to boot them over to. On the np side we have Nepal which is its name both in its native language and English so that’s out too. Japan is widely known as Japan in English so it ended up getting jp so Nicaragua could have ni and Nepal get np.
It’s not perfect and not even internally consistent at times (for example ISO allocated East Germany dd even though it typically didn’t do self-descriptors like “Democratic” in picking country codes but did with East Germany who were the DDR) but it ended up being workable for all involved.
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