# Why the .co in .co.uk and others? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 2, 2009, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680 "2009-09-02T21:44:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/21 "2009-09-03T02:23:12Z")
Yeah, well, play WoW and get to 65 on Telnet. Then I’ll be impressed. ---
**Author:** ![ctnguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@ctnguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ctnguy)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/22 "2009-09-03T02:25:00Z")
> [@Bytegeist](#): > > It seems to be a common myth in the UK that a Briton invented the Internet. This is about the fifth time I’ve come across it in the past few years. I think it’s just a result of the very common belief that the World Wide Web and the Internet are the same thing. And since the Internet doesn’t have a single easily identifiable inventor (other than Al Gore, who doesn’t count), Tim Berners-Lee gets identified as the one. ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/23 "2009-09-03T02:28:37Z")
> [@BorgHunter](#): > > You can use telnet to connect to the World Wide Web. I’ve sent raw HTTP requests manually, just for the hell of it. I used to do this frequently when debugging web applications, until more convenient tools came along. I’ve also sent lots of email by telnetting to SMTP servers. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/24 "2009-09-03T02:48:19Z")
> [@Reply](#): > > Yeah, well, play WoW and get to 65 on Telnet. Then I’ll be impressed. You noob, telnet wow preceded your fancy-pants 3d wow by decades. I was leveling on telnet before you even had a video card. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/25 "2009-09-03T02:49:31Z")
> [@ctnguy](#): > > I think it’s just a result of the very common belief that the World Wide Web and the Internet are the same thing. And since the Internet doesn’t have a single easily identifiable inventor (other than Al Gore, who doesn’t count), Tim Berners-Lee gets identified as the one. Yeah, it’s a really insiduous belief. I think it goes pretty high up. Like all the excitement about “Web” applications. Omg. They’re like real applications that connect to the internet, but three times crappier! Time to invest a few hundred million… ---
**Author:** ![TBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c89c15/32.png) [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/26 "2009-09-03T04:15:05Z")
Saying Tim Berners-Lee created the internet is like saying Bill Gates invented the computer. ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/27 "2009-09-03T04:55:54Z")
[National Geographic](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090831-internet-40th-video-ap.html) (warning: video with sound will play automatically) is saying that today (2 September 2009) marks the 40th anniversary of the birth of the internet. > [@](#): > > Then on September 2nd 1969, in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, two computers passed test data through a 15-foot gray cable. > > Stanford Research Institute joined the fledging ARPANET network a month later; UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah joined by year’s end, and the internet was born. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/28 "2009-09-03T06:52:24Z")
> [@Arnold\_Winkelried](#): > > [National Geographic](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090831-internet-40th-video-ap.html) (warning: video with sound will play automatically) is saying that today (2 September 2009) marks the 40th anniversary of the birth of the internet. Except the Internet Protocol came (much) later, actual gateways came later (A gateway moves data from one physical network to another, even if those networks have different low-level protocols. This is fundamental to the Internet.), and, in general, the early ARPANET was _very_ different, in every respect, from even the Internet of the late 1980s. This kitchen-sink history is distressing. It muddies the view of reality for the sake of a simple narrative. (Oh, and the idea that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet is entirely wrong and more than a little amusing. The Web was never intended to be very important: It was a mangled implementation of Project Xanadu, which never got off the ground, and it was going up against the established Gopher protocol, a darling of academia in those days. By all rational measures it should have died on the vine.) ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/29 "2009-09-03T06:57:02Z")
Gopher was awesome. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/30 "2009-09-03T07:08:28Z")
> [@friedo](#): > > Gopher was awesome. Gopher was easy to implement well on very small systems. It was (and is) a very simple protocol. [Here is “Hobbes’ Internet Timeline”, a good place to start for researching the history of the Internet.](http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/) [Here is a post of mine with cites that expounds further on when the Internet was invented.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9798160&postcount=49) You can take your pick from 1969 (ARPANET founded), 1977 (first gateway between dissimilar networks), or 1983 (invention of the actual Internet Protocol). I think 1977 was the most important date out of the three, myself. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 7:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/31 "2009-09-03T07:49:46Z")
The point of subdomains for a national registrar is that is can be used to drive competition or manage DNS registration policy. So it is possible for different organisations to provide management for (say) .org.uk and .net.uk, and these also compete with .org and .net. This has driven registration costs down. And the registrars for .gov.uk, .sch.uk and .ac.uk require validation when registering, so that domain squatting and the like do not occur in these domains - there is a higher level of confidence for people using these sites that they are getting to where they want to be. Also, the size of the expected space is an issue, too. .dk may be considered too small to split up, whereas .uk is a pretty big space. It is is also interesting to realise that the UK internet initially used the JANET name resolution system, which reversed the name components (UK.AC.OXFORD vs [oxford.ac.uk](http://oxford.ac.uk)). I quite like the BigEndian approach, and it would be somewhat easier to parse and process from a software point of view. Si ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 9:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/32 "2009-09-03T09:49:30Z")
> [@Candyman74](#): > > Domains have values and the .com version of a word generally has the highest value. So [sex.com](http://sex.com) is probably amongst the highest valued domain names. I had an interesting correspondence with the guy who registered [sex.com](http://sex.com) in the early days.. (I’d emailed him complimenting him on his foresight). He had a rough time for a while, somebody else spirited it away somehow and it took him years of court actions to retrieve it. All ended well though, he got it back and made a bundle from it, still does as far as I know. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/33 "2009-09-03T10:30:52Z")
For a while, public school websites ended in [k12.xx.us](http://k12.xx.us), where xx was the state abbreviation. For a while, I thought .ca was in California, not Canada. ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/34 "2009-09-03T11:06:25Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > For a while, public school websites ended in [k12.xx.us](http://k12.xx.us), where xx was the state abbreviation. For a while, I thought .ca was in California, not Canada. My private high school also had a [k12.me.us](http://k12.me.us) domain, until they got a .edu somehow. (Also, I find “me dot us” hilarious.) ---
**Author:** ![Fake\_Tales\_of\_San\_Francisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8491ac/32.png) [@Fake\_Tales\_of\_San\_Francisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fake_Tales_of_San_Francisco)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 12:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/35 "2009-09-03T12:31:00Z")
Australia follows a similar protocol. (.com.au) In addition to educational, governmental and organisation domains etc, there are also state domains, such as .vic.au (For Victoria). ---
**Author:** ![qazwart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/5fc32e/32.png) [@qazwart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/qazwart)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/36 "2009-09-03T16:30:18Z")
> [@Sri\_Theo](#): > > The question is pretty simple, I managed to dig up this after a lot of fruitless googling- [.co - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.co) which explains some details. > > But it doesn’t seem to explain to me why certain countries use it and not others; for example Danish websites end in .dk, American ones end in .us, Irish in .ie etc. But British ones end in .co.uk, Japanese in .co.jp and amusingly enough the cook islands end in .co.ck. > > So I was wondering if anyone can shed some light as to why this is. Those two letters are beginning to really get on my nerves. Each country controls its own country code and can decide to do whatever they want with it. For example, Tuvala, whose domain suffix is “tv” decided to use its domain to sell to television stations. For a while, the people who controlled the .us domain insisted you had to have a state code and sometimes the city area or county like [mydomain.houston.tx.us](http://mydomain.houston.tx.us). The idea was to allow local businesses with the same name to have more or less the same domain like [flowergarden.memphis.tn.us](http://flowergarden.memphis.tn.us) vs. [flowergarden.berkeley.ca.us](http://flowergarden.berkeley.ca.us). However, the .us domain controlled by a for-profit business and they no longer have this requirement. This forces businesses to purchase not only a .com domain, but a .biz, .info, and .us domain. The .uk domain is controlled by a non-profit company called [Nominet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominet_UK), and Nominet decided this extended the .uk domain naming scheme because it allowed universities and schools a way of using the “uk” domain while at the same time letting the world know they’re a university. For example [oxford.ac.uk](http://oxford.ac.uk) (The “ac” means academic institution). The .co.uk domain suffix is actually the fourth most popular in the world. It has the paunch of both saying you’re a commercial establishment (like the .com domain), but you are not just some vulgar American firm but a blue-blooded British concern. Of course, anyone is allowed to buy a .co.uk domain name – even vulgar Americans. ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/37 "2009-09-03T17:17:38Z")
> [@Candyman74](#): > > That’s a common myth in the US, but [the guy who invented the internet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee) is alive and well, and is British. The internet and domain names are older than the web. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/38 "2009-09-03T18:57:11Z")
> [@si\_blakely](#): > > It is is also interesting to realise that the UK internet initially used the JANET name resolution system, which reversed the name components (UK.AC.OXFORD vs [oxford.ac.uk](http://oxford.ac.uk)). For a while, JANET’s big-endian scheme vied with the rest of the world’s little-endian scheme, with conversion done on the machines that saw both networks, leading to the old joke that British email was getting routed to Czechoslovakia (.cs). Why? Because the mail intended for a Computer Science department would have ‘cs’ in the least-significant part of the domain name, making little-endian systems think that was the TLD. (Hey, I said the joke was _old_, not _funny_. ;)) ---
**Author:** ![IAmNotSpartacus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@IAmNotSpartacus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IAmNotSpartacus)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2009, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/39 "2009-09-05T17:25:51Z")
Why no love for Vinton Cerf or Robert Kahn? Where would be without TCP/IP?? As for “who” invented the internet, I think the “best” answer to that question would be “DARPA” … no? ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2009, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680/40 "2009-09-05T19:06:55Z")
> [@Bytegeist](#): > > It seems to be a common myth in the UK that a Briton invented the Internet. This is about the fifth time I’ve come across it in the past few years. [Donald Davies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies) independently invented packet switching in 1965 and coined the term while working for the National Physical Laboratory. This concept was eventually used in the fledgling ARPANET which developed into the Internet. I don’t know if I would call him the inventor of the Internet, but the Internet couldn’t have happened without packet switching. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-co-in-co-uk-and-others/508680.md?page=3)