Example: .co.uk or .co.nz and .com.au or .com.ar
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The “co” and the “com” are both shortenings of “commercial”. The national suffixes you listed are simply optional domains for if you want to reinforce the location of your website’s “stuff”.
But it’s all basically optional. When you buy a website, you can choose any domain you like with any suffix, with only a handful of exceptions that are dedicated to specific organisations (such as governments).
Each country decided which second-level domains they want to use. The UK and NZ decided they want the second-level domain “co” for commercial websites, while Australia and Argentina decided to use “com”. There’s no particular reason why. Germany for example decided to not require second-level domains at all, so there’s no official “.co.de” or “.com.de” domain (for example Google’s Germany website is just www.google.de).
The internet is made up of websites, which are like buildings. The buildings have different addresses, which tell you where they are. The part of the address that comes after the dot is called the top-level domain. The most common top-level domains are .com, .net, and .org. But there are also lots of other top-level domains, like .co, .us, and .uk.
In the begining we only had a few top level domains (tlds) such as com, net, org. Eventually icann the organization that controls tlds decided they would give each country a tld and they could register new websites names. Columbia got co. With so many websites coming online, all the short names were quickly taken so you had to choose, if you wanted your name to be mycompanyllc.com or mycompany.co a lot of times the county domain names would be much cheaper than the “normal” one as well.
A domain name is a dot `.` separated identifier that identifies ownership from the right to the left.
A way to read a domain name like `company.co.uk` is “name `company` is registered to the `co` domain that itself is registered to the `uk` domain”.
It’s up to `company` to decide which domain it wants to be registered under.
FYI, ownership might not be the best term, but it is close enough.
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