[ih] .UK vs .GB

[Patrik Fältström]

On 13 Apr 2018, at 15:12, John Levine wrote:

> In another list someone was wondering why British domain names are mostly in .UK even though the ISO 3166 code has always been .GB.
>
> I know this came up before but can't find the discussion.  Pointers or rehash welcome.  The first mention I can find of .UK is in an example in RFC 821 in 1982, the first statement that ccTLDS would be ISO 3166 codes was in 1984.

The only explanation I got orally was that "GB stands for Great Britain, while UK stands for United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Northern Ireland".

That was enough for me. Don't even remember who explained it, but it was around the famous entry of .CS into the root zone that created the "interesting" situation with CS.BERKELEY.EDU (and others) and massive weird extra hacking in sendmail.cf due to the Janet "reverse" order of labels in a domain name.

But, I might also have constructed this story in my head... :-)

   paf
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