To me it’s interesting that the United States government uses .gov, while other countries use .co codes (like .co.uk). It seems to imply: “Washington is THE government; these other governments are just local country governments”. Might that be the outright intention? Does anyone know anything about the history of these internet suffixes?
Wiki says:
The U.S. is the only country that has a government-specific top-level domain in addition to its country-code top-level domain. This is a result of the origins of the Internet as a U.S. federal government-sponsored research network (see ARPANET and National Science Foundation Network). Other countries typically delegate a second-level domain for this purpose.
where the US has .gov and .com.
other countries use the differentiated .gov.uk and .co.uk
but gov is still in there. for example www.direct.gov.uk
Internet was made by Americans for Americans. Others were an afterthought. They made it only this year so that you can have domain name contain a non-English alphabet letter. Specifically it now also accepts letters from Russian and Bulgarian cyrillic alphabets.
In light of something like that most others getting only one suffix isn’t really unexpected.