Because "uk" isn't in ISO 3166-1 alpha 2, "gb" is, and the formal designation for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is "gb".

It wouldn't be nonsense for northern Irish businesses to have .gb domains, because that's what the ISO convention says it would be.

The change will basically never happen though; ICANN has basically acquiesced any attempt to change it (after a weak attempt to do so in the 90s), and since it's pretty unlikely in the near future that another country gets "uk" as their alpha 2 designation, they aren't in any hurry to force the matter. "gb" is still marked as reserved though.

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roryirvine 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the early 2000s I did a bit of consultancy for a company that'd done a deal with Nicaragua's NIC to offer ".co.ni" domains to businesses in Northern Ireland (at the time, the commercial second level domain in Nicaragua was .com.ni, so there wasn't a conflict with existing use).

Unfortunately the venture failed (and I went unpaid!), but the Nicaraguan NIC stepped in to continue service for the handful of .co.ni domains that had been registered at that point.

There'd been a similar effort for Scotland, using both .co.sc and .co.al (for Alba, in Scots Gaelic), but it was even less successful.

These days, there are gTLDs with .scot, .cymru, .wales, and .london existing since 2014-ish. There'll be another round of gTLD applications next year, so I suppose someone might register .unitedkingdom or .ukogbani, but the domain name goldrush days are long over...

	▲	gizajob 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Hail our ukogbani overlords. Sorry to hear you didn’t get paid.

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gizajob 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well half of Northern Ireland would happily burn your ISO rulebook to the ground. Plus nobody says “I’m from GB” when abroad, we all say “I’m from the UK”. Country is called UK.

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arethuza 5 days ago | parent [-]

I thought most people would say which part of the UK they are from: England, Scotland, Wales or NI?

	▲	gizajob 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah that happens too. I generally say UK. In Europe I’m maybe prone to saying England/English perhaps, like in Italy “Io sono Inglese” but in the UK my parents are welsh and I was born in England so don’t really identify with either very strongly. Particularly because I’m a scouser, like you’d identify yourself to other British people by your accent if you have a strong obvious one. Regardless though nobody says “GB”.