short term, presumably the conflict in this case would be with the one-time republic of czechosolvakia, of which no trace appears to remain in the dns, and which probably went away long enough ago that stale urls, bookmarks, and address books are not a major concern.
Ack.
The number is a bit smaller than that, since a handful of codes are permanently reserved for other purposes. But, compared to the number of countries in the world (or even country names) since, e.g., 1960, 650+ actually is a big number... It is at least one that leaves a more comfortable margin than, e.g., 2**31 in a well-known other context where, unlike country names/codes, explosive growth is plausibly likely.long term, you're sneaking up on the "melancholy elephants" problem (see spider robinson's story by that name): 26**2 isn't a big number.