www.welcome to map men.com
We're the men.org
And here's the .map/titles
♫ Map Men, Map Men ♫ Map Map Map Men, Men
Today's programme is about a map of the internet.
Hang on, we did that last time.
Yes but that was a different map of the internet.
Is it different enough that we won't repeat ourselves
and the story will still feel completely unique and compelling?
Absolutely.
Oh go on then.
This map shows all the registered ccTLDs on the DNS system.
CC whats?
Ah yes.
Before we get to the juicy map bit
we need a crash course in the internet.
Strap in.
Oops.
Back in the early days of the Internet when computers look like this
people surfed the Internet by painstakingly typing
entire website addresses into the URL bar of a browser.
The words in this web address are known as a domain name
and every single one is stored on something called the Domain Name System, or DNS.
The DNS does one very important job.
It translates memorable website addresses into the horribly
unmemorable IP addresses made up of numbers and dots
that computers use to communicate and access websites.
- Miaow - Hahaha
This worked fine for the first few years.
But as the early Internet grew, it became clear that this system
wouldn't be able to cope with demand.
In the 1980s, a California based supergeek called Jon Postel
figured out a way of streamlining this clunky system.
And what he did was so important, it would eventually earn him the nickname
'God of the internet'.
Jon broke down the DNS into a hierarchical system
that commands could flow through without getting all clogged up.
And to make it work, every website now included something called a TLD
or Top Level Domain.
The TLD is the flourish after the dot
that describes the type of website you're looking at.
The first six to be included were .gov
Governmenty.
.edu
Educationy.
.net
Internetty.
.mil
military-y.
.org
Relating to nonprofit organs.
And by far most famously, .com.
Commercially, slash absolutely anythingy.
Most computer scientists at the time
felt that these six top level domains was plenty to be getting on with.
But Jon Postel was no most computer scientist.
He cleverly envisaged the future
and predicted that the internet would spread around the world
one day being used by as many as 4,000 people.
So to stop the six TLDs getting overcrowded with websites
in 1985 he invented a new subcategory:
The Country Code Top Level Domain
or ccTLD.
ccTLDs worked like the +44 dialing code you have to put
on a phone number when calling the UK from abroad.
Like this.
The country code TLD is this bit
which comes before the slash, after the dot
and sometimes, depending on the country, after another TLD.
Such as the co in .co.uk
or the com in .com.au.
The important thing is, the country code always has two letters.
Most people don't give a second, let alone a third thought to these codes.
But because we love countries
And because we have a vested interest in the internet
We've gone and given at least four thoughts to them.
And it turns out country code top level domains are a fascinating mess.
There are 195 UN recognized countries.
So there should be 195 country code TLDs.
But there are 308!
Why so many?
Who was responsible for giving out all these codes?
Helpfully for our costume budget it was Jon Postel again.
Rather than come up with a two-letter code for every country himself
which would have taken at least half an hour
Jon took the easy route and found a pre-existing list
the catchilly titled:
♫ ISO 3166-1 ♫
which had been invented in the 70s for the purposes of post.
And because it was for post it also included a lot of islands
that weren't strictly speaking countries.
Some of the extra non-country country codes included Antarctica
aq
United States Minor Outlying Islands
um
And St Helena
sh
(whispered) Sorry, St Helena.
So the internet, just like the real world, was now divided into countries
and that didn't cause any problems at all.
OR DID IT...?!
How's the barbecue coming along?
Er... not good.
Why, what's happened?
I don't want to talk about it.
You don't want to talk about why the barbecue's not good?
Sorry I don't talk about my problems.
I'm a real man.
What do you mean?
I am a real man!
I'm in charge of my own barbecue like a real man.
And real men don't talk about the things that are going wrong in their lives.
It's like Dad always used to say...
Shut up, son.
Of course, how have you been since your dad died last week?
Well that's a shame because with all this awful stuff you've been going through
I was going to recommend you talk to someone using BetterHelp.
Butter help?
BetterHelp.
Better explain.
BetterHelp...
(Paid partnership!!)
...is an online platform
that will assess your needs and match you with
your very own professional therapist.
Therapy?
I don't want to sit in an uncomfortable waiting room.
It's all online.
You can book weekly sessions with your therapist
via video or over the phone.
I don't know. My problems are pretty specific.
BetterHelp has more than 30,000 therapists with a broad range of expertise
and you can ask to be matched with someone new
at any time at no extra cost.
I suppose talking to someone would be the first step
towards taking control of my happiness
and achieving my life's goals.
Click the link in the description below
to get 10% off your first month
and start talking now.
Speaking of which, perhaps it's time you told me
what's gone wrong with your barbecue?
I didn't buy any food.
Jon Postel had just split the planet up into two-letter codes
and immediately ran into a problem:
This country.
The existing code from the ISO list was GB
But Britain already had its own academic network called Janet
which used .uk.
So to save faff, he let Britain keep its non-ISO code: .uk
which was very sensible because GB stands for Great Britain
and excludes Northern Ireland, and UK doesn't.
Incidentally, it took the driving in another country stickers people
several decades to catch up.
Even more sensibly, Postel also predicted that in the future
there'd be plenty more potential problems where this one came from.
So he set up the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
ICANN - in case he I can't do the job anymore.
And it's a good thing he did
Because after his ungodly death in 1998
his prediction of future disagreements came predictably true.
Some places that had no business being included on a list of country codes
demanded to be added.
Such as the EU which is, in fact, several countries.
Another headache for ICANN was the world map kept changing.
They had to add new country codes for new countries.
And they had to remove country codes for now defunct countries.
Defunctries.
But one code they curiously didn't retire was .su, the Soviet Union.
Even though the Soviet Union stopped being a thing in 1991
and the 15 countries it broke up into all got their own lovely codes in 1994,
Pressure from lobbyists who always quite liked the Soviet Union
persuaded ICANN to keep the old Soviet domain
just in case.
Most are now nasty scamming sites
So if you're thinking about surfing the .su web
make sure your antivirus is good and up to date.
Ohh, when can we look at that really interesting looking map?!
Right away.
This world map shows the size of each country adjusted
to reflect the number of country code domain websites that are registered there.
The first thing you notice is that some countries
are alarmingly massively bigger than they are in real life.
the UK, Netherlands, and Germany for example.
This shouldn't come as a surprise.
After all, these countries are densely populated
with big economies, and lots of computers.
Broadly, these three factors explain most of the weirdness.
Including the alarmingly asymmetrical North and South Koreas
or the the relative smallness of Africa,
which has fewer registrations than all of Germany put together.
But what makes this map truly fascinating
is the anomalies that don't make obvious sense.
Such as the USA.
Why is the world's largest economy so shrivelly small?
Dot US is, surprisingly, one of the developed world's least used ccTLDs.
The USA, which often considers itself the world's default country
has selfishly adopted the supposedly international TLD dot com as their own.
As the inventors of the country code themselves,
the way they see it, country codes are only required
for websites that fall into the niche category of "foreign".
Perhaps the biggest mystery is
What on this map of Earth is this massive island country
with nearly 25 million domains, the highest of all,
with the country code .tk?
Turkey?
Turkey's not an island.
Torquay?
Torquay doesn't have a K.
So where is it?
Tokelau.
Never heard of it.
Neither have I.
Neither have you.
Tokelau is a minuscule island chain in the Pacific
with a total area of 4 square miles - a fifth the size of Torquay.
It's not even a country, but a territory of New Zealand.
And the CIA says it has the smallest economy in the world.
It has the smallest economy in the world.
It's so remote that it was the last place on earth
to be connected to the telephone - in 1997.
So why does this place have more domains under management than anywhere else?
To understand that, you need to understand
the most important rule when it comes to country codes.
Which is?
That there are no rules!
It's up to each individual country to come up with its own policy
for how its ccTLD is used.
Some countries are strict, only letting their own residents register
but others allow their ccTLDs to be used by anyone who wants them
from anywhere on the planet.
So why do so many people want to use Tokelau's letters
and why does Tokelau want to let them?
Because money and because money.
In 2001, a Dutch tech entrepreneur called Joost Zuurbier
offered to pay the Tokelauan government
to let him give away .tk domains for free
in exchange for hosting ads.
Win, win win.
Unfortunately this resulted in .tk being used
for millions of temporary domains by spammers, fishers and cyber criminals.
Which is why, rounded up to the nearest 1%
100% of all .tk websites are registered to people who are not really in Tokalau
and have never actually been there.
As recently as November 2023, TK's free domains were discontinued
meaning this map is already out of date
and Tokelau will have to find another way to literally put themselves on the map.
But other countries didn't have to work so hard
to get a similar slice of the action
because the two-letter codes they got given were like a winning lottery ticket.
Just up the road from Tokalau,
the tiny island nation of Tuvalu noticed that their two letters, .tv,
might be very desirable to television and gaming websites.
So in 1995 they started selling their domain to sites like twitch.tv
earning them a handsome $10 million a year
even though less than half the country has access to the Internet.
Meanwhile in North Africa,
the nation of Libya noticed that their letters, .ly
sounded like an adverb.
So they sold their catchy sounding domain to sites like Bitly.
The Federated States of Micronesia sold theirs to radio stations
Djibouti to their disc jockeys,
And a whole host of other countries that sound like things
have been playing the same domain name fame game.
What this map shows best is that the success of a ccTLD
is a reflection of that country's power, history, governance
and good luck.
And name.
But what staring at this map makes us wonder is
why should the internet even need country codes?
Isn't the idea of dividing the planet by nation states so 20th century
and the opposite of what the internet is supposed to be about?
The answer is: Who cares?
These days it's perishingly rare that you ever find a website
by typing in the URL yourself.
With such little attention paid to the URL
it might as well be random letters and numbers
that only computers understand, just like it used to be.
And this may well be why nonsensical TLDs have been allowed to flourish.
and not just the country codes.
The six TLDs we started with
have now expanded to 1500
and they're no longer limited to three letters
allowing such terrific specifics as dot cat, dot ninja,
dot pizza and dot unicorn.
So who knows what TLDs and ccTLDs will look like
on the internet of a billion years in the future?
Well if it carries on like this, there probably won't be any typing at all
and the internet will just come at you like wasps.