Fri Dec 02, 2005 3:54 pm by andy101
.uk is owned by the United Kingdom, we here in the UK have decided to split up are country allocated names to make it easier to work out what the site your are looking at is. Similar to the way the global namespace was set up.
.co.uk means its a UK Company, you can buy them the same way you would buy a .com is is NOT owned by an indivdual company
.org.uk UK Charity
.ac.uk UK Academic Site
Claiming the the US does not have a country level domain is just pure ignorance of the way the internet works, country level domians are assigned based on the ISO's country code list.
The reason you see alot of .co.uk is it is what lots of British people use, it has nothing to do with the hosting company. It is not like the subdomains assigned by the webhosts. You really should only be using .co.uk if you are from the UK. If you put a site up thats targeted at the US market for instance it would be very confusing, also some techies frown upon missuse of the domain name system.