If you judged each country based on how many websites used their two-letter Internet domain code, like Canada’s .ca or India’s .in, the U.S. would pale in comparison to the might of the United Kingdom, Germany and China.
Nominet, the official registry for UK domain names, created a map of the world that bases country size on how many websites use those two-letter domains. (For example, the French version of Google is google.fr, so that counts as a website in France.)
But what is that island east of Asia and Australia? That’s the New Zealand island territory Tokelau, racking up an impressive 30 million domain registrations.
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Why exactly does Tokelau have so many websites using its .tk domain? Because it’s free. Freenom, a Netherlands-based company, has been providing free .tk domain names since 2000, and gives advertising money back to the 1,400 people of Tokelau. Freenom also provides services for Mali (.ml), Gabon (.ga), Central African Republic (.cf) and Equatorial Guinea (.gq).
That explains why .tk is so large, but what about America? Although the U.S.-associated .com domain is by far the most common domain with 123 million registrations, the official country code .us is not very popular at all. According to .us registry Neustar, the .us domain launched in 1985 but was only available for governments and schools until 2002.
With its late public start, .us was relegated to a less-desirable category than .com, and even many government bodies use .gov instead of .us. Meanwhile, .com isn't on the map because it doesn't belong to any one country.
Also not shown on the map: web addresses that use non-Latin alphabets. Countries that use other alphabets had to wait until 2010 to get web addresses in their own languages, according to the BBC.
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