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UK Parliament Domain Without Registrar
asobala writes "According to this story at The Register, the UK parliament is using the domain www.parliament.uk. It's a top-level domain because it was registered before August 1996, before Nominet handled .uk domains. But since there is no registrar, they can't prove that they own it."
There was a discussion about this on the Nominet mailing lists recently. The most convincing reason is Northern Ireland.
.uk, the powers that be decided on using .uk for British domains, and it's stuck ever since.
The official name of the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. "Great Britain" is the island that includes England, Wales, Scotland and the multitude of little islands, which includes the Isle of Wight (part of England), the Isle of Man (not really part of the UK at all), and doesn't include the Channel Islands (which are closest to Normandy, which the French refer to as the Anglo-Norman islands, but otherwise are as British as the Isle of Man).
"GB" would be a useful code, except that it excludes Northern Ireland, and if you've followed Northern Irish history at all you'll know that the the protestants / Unionists in Northern Ireland are very fond of being part of the UK, and would vehemently protest to the UK being known by a code, "GB", that explicitly did not include them.
So, way before ICANN's official policy to use the ISO country codes for ccTLDs, and even though Ukraine had a strong claim to