i.e. the whole thing turned into a complete and utter farce long ago.
In the end it's not a perfect world and it's a hack because the very tld domain system itself was woefully broken even in conception.
Eh? The UK (not "England") use .uk. This is then subdivided into .co.uk, .ac.uk, .org.uk, .gov.uk and many more depending on the type of organisation, as ccTLDs were initially envisioned, i.e. type.country
What actually happened is a massive waste of money paying for stupid extra domain names to stop someone else impersonating you. It's just historical.
And now they claim their increasingly worrying and opaque laws apply to any website that uses it, which is even worse for us all.
That the UK decided to then follow the naming convention (or any other country that did) is a waste of letters.
Total farce.
(I did actually mean UK, I'm English and it was a slip)
.uk was created before the standard was agreed, and the UK was allowed to keep using it.
Because the Americans owned ICANN, they got away with first-level domains for everything, .com, .gov, ... Other countries had to either put everything under one domain, or split it up like the brits.
.com, .net, .gov etc. were the first TLDs created in the early 1980s (when the DNS was invented, before ICANN existed). Only later in the mid 1980s were country codes added to the repertoire, and each country was given one based on the ISO 3166 standard — including the US (.us).
The only domains with geographic prohibitions were .gov and .mil, being run by the US Government. People of all countries have always been able to register domains in .com, .net etc., not just Americans.