.sh is Saint Helena? I always assumed it was just "shell". Are there any file extensions on the list that are technically country codes but nobody actually uses them for the country?
A more controversial example is .io for the Chagos Islands which was assigned .io because at various times it has been referred to by its colonialist name the British Indian Ocean Territory. As a place it is full of ugly history including the British forcefully exiling big parts of the native population to help the US build a military base there. The registrar in charge of .io is a British company and the money has almost never benefited the natives or residents of the Chagos Islands. But it became the "hip" tech company TLD because it looks like input/output. There have been multiple awareness campaigns trying to get tech companies to offset this colonial bias in internet infrastructure with donations to useful charities.
> The Chagossians are a mix of African, South Asian, and Malay descent. The French brought some to the Chagos Islands as slaves from Mauritius in 1776. Others arrived as fishermen, farmers, and coconut plantation workers during the 19th century. Under international law, they are the indigenous peoples of the Chagos archipelago, as they are descended from the earliest human settlers of the islands.
Eventually though, the UK government came back again, and forcefully removed these people who weren't natives before, but essentially because of forced re-population by colonizers became the natives. Now they want access to the land they were forcefully migrated to, after being removed from it.
Consider .uk vs .gb
.aq for Antarctica
.ax is part of Finland (.fi)
and so on.
Do we count .su?