Eh, Americans do it too, just less consistently. When's the last time you saw LASER?
I'd say things like laser are no longer the acronym they once were. How many people actually realize that laser is/was an acronym in the first place? The word itself has 'genericized' to the point that it's just a word to most people now.
I could as well suggest the same about Nasa :) For all HNers that the distinction will be incredibly obvious, to Joe Schmo from Idaho, perhaps less so.
I would imagine that most people don't know what NASA stands for. At this point it's just a word.
Americans do not do this, when was the last time you saw Potus?
On the flip side, it disambiguates the pronunciation. BBC has each letter spoken individually, NASA does not.
"BBC" is not an acronym though, it's an initialism.
That's the point I was making, yes.
And then you have brands like POLITICO who go and ruin it for everyone. I'm very glad we don't tolerate those case shenanigans.