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Generally, anyone who owns a domain at any level can make up whatever rules he or she desires to apply to its subdomains. If you own ponies.example.com, you could for example sell access to subdomains but decide to do it only if the subdomain is a color name (brown). In practice, almost nobody does this except the TLD owners.[1]
.uk was the second ccTLD ever, after .us, and only 7 months after the original TLDs. I suspect[2] that the existing partition among (non-cc) TLDs was somewhat in mind when the delegated registrar started handing out domains. Several other countries also followed the original UK partition scheme for their ccTLDs, as the comments have noted. See also: the Public Suffix List.
In 2014, the rules loosened such that you weren't forced into one of the strict second-level domains. If you had a .co.uk or similar, you got first right of refusal for the corresponding newly-available .uk.
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Typically "You can only have
_____.fooif you are a resident of Fooland," etc. There are exceptions likegithub.io, DDNS, and various "keep the net weird" kinds of groups. ↩︎ -
I fear this is not going to be a very satisfying answer overall, because it doesn't claim special knowledge on the "why" question. If another answer had documents from early Nominet UK history, I would upvote that. ↩︎
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