The Internet is full of different addresses these days. It’s not just the dot-com or dot-org or dot-gov world anymore. Countries are getting in the act now. That’s where ccTLD comes in.
Internet address naming conventions are proliferating in large part because of the explosion in interest in such things in the past decade or so. Having the freedom to create a website that ends in something other than .com is empowering and more plausible every day. Common three-letter alternatives to .com are .mil for military, .biz for business, and .int for international organization.
The three-letter designations that end many Internet addresses — like com and org and gov — are called TLDs, or top-level domains. A whole different area of address is available as well, corresponding to the country in which the Internet site resides. These are called country codes, and they are two letters instead of three. The acronym for country code Top-level Domain is ccTLD.
Some examples of ccTLD are us for United States, uk for United Kingdom, de for Germany, nz for New Zealand, and eg for Egypt. Each ccTLD, if sounded out or compared to the name of the country or its dominant language, makes sense as the designation for that country. In some cases, the ccTLD is the first two letters of the name of the country, such as fr for France, th for Thailand, and ar for Argentina. Other countries, especially ones that have two-word names, have their initials as the ccTLD, such as us for United States, sa for Saudi Arabia, and cr for Costa Rica.
Sometimes, a ccTLD is active even though the country it was created to represent is no longer in existence. For example, dd was used for the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), cs was used for Czechoslovakia, and su was used for the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia is now two countries: the Czech Republic, which has cz as its ccTLD, and the Slovak Republic, which has sk as its ccTLD.
The advent of ccTLD has expanded the range of Internet addresses for websites. It is not unlimited, however. The world has only so many countries in it, although the number of names on this list seems to grow often. Yugoslavia, for example, became a handful of countries, as did the Soviet Union. The sky’s not the limit, although it’s close.