[ih] .UK vs .GB

[John Klensin]

> 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.

Let me try an even less complicated one, based on what I was told when
we were evaluating what became the decision to use ISO 3166 alpha-2
codes:   The country code system started because of a request from the
UK to be able to manage their own DNS hierarchy rather than depending
on a US-based organization to manage the TLD.  The ccTLDs are US and
UK were decided upon (and possibly delegated) before other
administrative decisions about ccTLDs were made and "UK" was what they
asked for.

FWIW: (1) While RFC 1591 was not published until 1994, it, for the
most part, described thinking and procedures that had had been in
place for years rather than anything of significant that was novel.
(2) YJ Park, whom some of you may know, tried to sort though all of
these issues and history while working on her dissertation.  The
search for answers to questions of this type might reasonably start
with her and that dissertation.  That should lead to some context and
references even where she does not have exact answers.

    john