Seems like Trump’s tariffs are based on country code domains — Why it

It likely has to do with what these domains are based on, not the list of domains themselves.

As investors nurse their losses from the latest round of Trump’s tariffs, many are scrambling to make sense of the Trump administration’s seemingly erratic rationale for which countries were targeted.

One theory making the rounds in articles and social media is that the tariffs are tied to country code domain names. Following all, how else do you explain placing tariffs on uninhabited islands that happen to use the .hm country code?

While looking for meaning in the chaos is tempting, and I won’t claim to know what the Trump administration is thinking, there’s likely a more straightforward and more logical explanation than domain names.

Country code domains (ccTLDs) are assigned based on the ISO 3166-1 standard. If a territory or entity is on that list, it can get a ccTLD for the two-letter code on the list.

So rather than the administration targeting countries since they have domain names, it’s more plausible that the list of tariff targets was pulled from ISO 3166-1. The overlap with domain names is only since the domain system uses the ISO list.