When a country code stops meaning a country

The registry decides who may buy

Some countries require the holder to have a local connection — an address, a company, a citizenship. Others open registration to the whole world because they see revenue in it. That is a registry decision, not a global rule.

Hence the split you see in practice: .pl and .de are used locally, while .tv, .me, .io and .co behave like ordinary industry extensions.

Search engines make the same distinction

Google treats most country extensions as a geographic signal: .pl points at Poland, .de at Germany. A handful of extensions used widely outside their home country are treated generically instead, and do not tie a site to any market.

So a site on .tv will not be pushed towards residents of Tuvalu. It also gains no advantage in Poland — unlike .pl.

What follows for your choice of address

If you sell in one country, that country extension is the cheapest and clearest trust signal available. Visitors recognise the address they already know.

If you are building something without borders, an industry extension may suit you better — provided you have priced it. Keeping .io costs several times what a European country domain costs, every year.

One more point, unrelated to marketing: extensions detached from their country are often the ones without RDAP, so availability results for them are less certain.