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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

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

But Hungary is .hu (not .ma or .mo for Magyarország), Finland is .fi (not .su for Suomi).

I wonder how much of this is about avoiding collisions. .su would have been Soviet Union at the time. There are a lot of countries that begin with M, so I can see trying to avoid an M code for Hungary. There seems to be some precedent for steering countries away from common letters, if you read the tea leaves in the table (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2): there are lots of C countries, so Croatia ends up with .hr (from Hrvatska) and Chad ends up with .td (from Tchad), and the S countries are just a mess.

If I remember correctly the soviet union had SU at one point so that might have something to do with why finland is fl.

That says why it isn't .su, not why it is .fi. They could have come up with some other two letter code based on their name in their native tongue, just like all the US states beginning with "Mi" that aren't Michigan.

Well technically Swedish is also a native tongue (and official language) of Finland, so .fi is a two letter code based on a native tongue.

And Sweden isn't .sw (English "Sweden") or .sv (Swedish "Sverige") but .se. I'm assuming .sw isn't used because of possible confusion with Switzerland.

> If I remember correctly the soviet union had SU at one point so that might have something to do with why finland is fl.

.su still exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su

Also, oddly, a Finnish person proposed .su for the Soviet Union:

> The .su domain was proposed by the then-19-year-old Finnish student Petri Ojala.

Nothing odd about that, these country codes were set more than a decade before .su was introduced. Finland had already been FI since 1974.

Czech Republic is .cz, not .če or .ce or even .cr

Croatia is .hr

Croatia was late to the game, only getting its code when Yugoslavia broke up. By then .cr was already taken (Costa Rica). So were .ca, .co, and .ci - Canada, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire. .ct was available though.

not necessarily, local name is Hrvatska so it's questionable if they would have assigned `.cr` had it been available. Most users of `.hr` sites are locals so it makes sense to them but have seen confusion on websites that target foreigners.

and .gr is Greece, not Hellas.

But the ISO 3166 code for Hungary is HU, the ISO3166 code for Finland is FI and the ISO3166 code for Czechia is CZ.

The ISO3166 code for Germany is DE.

e: is there something controversial about this?

Preaumably youre being downvoted because of

OP: Why are things this way?

You: Because that's the way things are.

The point is that these country codes predate the existence of TLDs by over a decade.

ISO codes are this way because either the countries wanted the specific codes or didn't provide input.

Almost all ccTLDs match their 2-letter ISO3166 codes.

Right but that doesn't answer the underlying question of why countries wanted codes based upon their English or local names.

Nobody was even thinking about TLDs when these were being decided.

I would imagine that only a few, if any, countries really cared very much about this at the time.

Nothing controversial at all. Just a bunch of folks speculating about it with a lack of information. There's an RFC about this and a nice wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain

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