The domain for CSS Guidelines is a real shame. It wins points for vanity but it's on Spain's tld. ccTlds tend to be localised such that you don't see them unless you're in the country.
In Google results you mean, or by the site operators themselves?
I agree if you mean in Google results. I don’t so much agree if you mean by the site operators. At least not for European cctlds. I find it far more common that sites from the US are inaccessible to Europe, than to see a site with a European cctld inaccessible to people in other countries.
Or did you mean sites that redirect to an international version of the same content? Sometimes that happens but usually only with sites belonging to big multi-national companies in my experience. And even then they often ask whether you’d like to stay on the version you went to or go to the version for another region or country.
It's not unique, the .cat TLD for Catalonia requires that you serve your content in Catalan, so as to prevent people abusing the obvious appeal of a TLD that in English translates to a cute pet.
.io, .ly and .sh have been victims of this technical imperialism.
It's the friggin' internet. If it's out there, someone will do something they feel like doing with it even if that's not the originally intended concept.
Yes, the owners of the TLD. The same way that I cannot register a .google, .no, or .uk at all.
They have benefitted from a large amount of revenue and if they wanted, they could have easily prevented foreign registrations by requiring a mailing address in the country or that the registered site has some tie to the region. Like your example of .cat.
What exactly have these countries lost?