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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>(Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)

Or how Österreich has a domain .at you mean? :P

There's already exceptions for this kind of thing all over the place. Russia has .ru despite not having a "u" anywhere in the name. Japan is .jp despite having nothing to do with Nippon.

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Well Russian is typically not written in Latin script, similarly Japanese. I don't know of anyone who refers to Switzerland as the "Helvetic Confederation". If I had to compress the names of all of earth's countries (and many non-country entities) into two or three ASCII characters I don't imagine I'd have done much better.

It's worth noting that Russia does have the .рф TLD ("RF" for Russian Federation) in addition to .ru.

Considering how ubiquitous Latin keyboards are I'm OK with countries with non-Latin character sets getting a Latin equivalent as it makes those domains much more accessible to a large part of the world.

The script doesn't really matter - if you write Russia's name in Russian, but using Latin letters, it would be "Rossiya". Still no "u" there anywhere.

I think we're all on the same page here. Using the English name instead of a transliteration is a compromise with downsides. It was not such a bad compromise in the early days of the internet, and now that we have Unicode domains we can have native-style tlds and that's a good thing.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria Austria is a very bad example, it is actually the latinized name and is widely used

Russia it self (the country ) doesn’t but Russian (the language) does. So one could argue...

None of these are exceptions, they're all the ISO3166 codes for their respective countries.

And where did the ISO3166 country codes come from?

ISO 3166 is regularly updated to reflect changes in country names and subdivisions. These changes are done by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO3166/MA).

The maintenance agency includes representatives from the following 14 organizations:

Association française de normalisation AFNOR (France) American National Standards Institute ANSI (United States) British Standards Institution BSI (United Kingdom) Deutsches Institut für Normung DIN (Germany) Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) Spanish Association for Standardization (UNE) Standards Australia (SA) Standards Council of Canada (SCC) Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Universal Postal Union (UPU) United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)

https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

Edit: tialaramex wrote a better explanation here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19625425

By exceptions I mean exceptions from the perceived standard of taking the country's name in its official language and shortening it. As observed, there are both domains which are shortened versions of the name in the official language(.de) and ones which have absolutely nothing to do with it(.at).

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