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Re: Fwd: ISO 3166-1 Newsletter V-8 on Serbia andMontenegro published



--On Wednesday, 23 July, 2003 16:12 -0400 Michael StJohns <mstjohns@mindspring.com> wrote:

The question was

if iso has a country code for X
         and X sets up servers and gets a cctld assigned
         and X is later not a country
           and iso assigns Y the country code previously used
by X            and there are active domains previously under
the cctld related to X        can Y set up servers and get the
cctld assigned to it that was previously assigned to X

I *don't* think there's a problem here as the ".cs" domain
doesn't appear to be active, but that's one man's groping of
the DNS and the internic whois.
Mike, while there is no predicting what ICANN might do --although I think things will be a lot more predictable with Louis Touton out of there-- that are a number of precedents (going back long before ICANN) for the situation in which a geographical area or country changes name and, consequently, ISO country code. In general, the IANA has taken the position that the old code continues to be _the_ country code and domain until there is an application for the new one. If and when that application appears, the applicant has generally been required to produce a transition plan: political changes in a country are not considered a sufficient condition for the country "owning" two ccTLDs forever.

As a consequence of that model, if X is no longer a country, and the code "X" is moved by 3166/MA from the 3166-1 list to the "reserved, no longer in use" list, it is unlikely that the "X" TLD will be reassigned to anyone except as part of a well-documented transition process to retire it.

The related question is
should we suggest ICANN drop a note to ISO asking them to
consider the current CCTLD structure when allocating codes and
to not re-use them in the future?
Unnecessary. ISO TC46 has long ago figured this out... about the time they got over their original position that the use of their Alpha-2 codes for Internet domain names was a bad idea and started to discover that it was the single most visible application of the IS 3166 standard. They have a whole hierarchy of "reserved" codes that are not to be reused except under the most unusual of circumstances, and the most-reserved of those lists is "used to be a country code, isn't any longer".

So, while ICANN will undoubtedly have to deal with the usual collection of actors/suspects trying to position themselves to operate a new ccTLD, I think that this is pretty much under control. And that it is, in any event, their problem and not ours. Fortunately.

regards,
john