Why do some countries use a second-level hierarchy for country code top-level domains? For example, Australia uses ".com.au" and the UK uses ".co.uk" to identify commercial and general purposes

In contrast to this, Germany uses ".de", France uses ".fr", and Russia uses ".ru" for commercial and general purposes.

Can someone please explain why countries like the UK and Australia have a second-level hierarchy? Wouldn't it be cleaner and easier for users to have all commercial and general UK websites to end in ".uk" instead of ".co.uk"?

Submitted December 05, 2018 at 02:47AM by spartangames https://ift.tt/2Eeehpu via TikTokTikk