Why is the United Kingdom named GB and not UK?
Oh glorious politics…. The official name of the UK is “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. When ISO 2-letter country codes were assigned, rumour has it that several members of the ISO comittee rebelled against using the “generic term” “united kingdom” as basis for a country code for an old imperial power, and enforced the code that fit the largest entity within that union. Of course, IANA, the domain name registration agency, like everyone else at the time, “knew” that the country was called UK, so the toplevel domain for the country was assigned as “UK” – it didn’t bother to check the standards, it was so obvious. Except that it wasn’t. The counter is very strict in trying not to invent new coding systems where old codes exist; in this particular case, it strictly follows a rule that says that country codes come from the Berlin maintenance agency for the ISO 3166 code space. So, until that agency changes the code for GB, GB it will stay.
