Not sure anyone can completely blame the Americans because postal addresses have traditionally followed the increasing size order; house, street, town, county, country.
For dates, the problem was multiple local standards making it hard to tell which standard was being used in any particular case. It may have been better for computer processing and sorting to have had gTLD first in URIs but at least there are no issues as to which standard is being used.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
