It's historical, back in the early days of list development, the UK started to develop a tournament scene, however many of the lists at the time had very considerable balance issues, and the development process to resolve these was a long and arduous process, so the decision was taken that a group of UK players would develop their own version of lists in a closed environment, circumventing much of the inertia in the NetEA project at the time, this meant that the UK tournament scene had access to more balanced lists for competition
NetEA has continued and many of the newer EpicUK lists have built off the NetEA variants, but often with some of the more esoteric options removed to streamline the lists for tournament play
EpicUK lists are used in EpicUK tournaments, but many people around the world use them where there is not an equivalent or if the lists are divergent and they prefer one over the other (many people prefer the EpicUK tyranid list over the NetEA version, they play quite differently, IIRC the Australian Tyranid list was based on the EpicUK approach, but using the newer tyranid creations from 40k)
The two groups are closely aligned, as Tiny-Tim and Steve54, both members of the ERC for the NetEA project, also are involved in EpicUK list development
Quite possibly if the lists of today had existed ~10 years ago, EpicUK wouldn't exist, but it's a historical split and we're a little too far down the path to backtrack now
The main groups are NetEA which is global and open to all, EpicUK which is for the EpicUK tournament scene, Epic-FR which again is a historical split, and the new guys on the block are EpicAU who develop lists for their own scene, there is no EpicUSA and no real need for one, most of the active people in the US scene are firmly involved in NetEA and happy with its direction
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