[governance] Countries and ccTLDs

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 01:54:58PM +0100,
 Bertrand de La Chapelle <bdelachapelle at gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 600 lines which said:

> Nations, economies, countries, communities, ..... What is the
> foundation for ccTLDs ?

The current theory, RFC 1591 and ICP1
(http://www.icann.org/icp/icp-1.htm) is that the foundation is the
ISO-3166-1 standard.

> ccTLDs were distributed initially by Postel according to an ISO
> standard 

As with many things done by Postel, there was a nice theory (RFC 1591
is a very good document and I often quote it) and a quite different
practice: ccTLD were created without any basis in the ISO standard
(".ac", ".gg"), domains refused to a national body were given to a
foreign company (".tf").

> Interrestingly enough, the corresponding sponsoring organizations
> are diverse, some ccTLDs being under the responsibility of AFNIC (in
> charge of the .fr), some being different and based in the respective
> territories.

The French law (which should have the last word here) says that the
registrieS (do note the plural form) for the national domainS are
determined by the governement but it does not say there should be only
one registry.

> So, clearly, ccTLDs are not limited to countries.

This is because you cannot define what a country is. The choice of RFC
1591 (stop arguing about wether X or Y is a country, just follow
ISO-3166-1 or, to quote the RFC, "The IANA is not in the business of
deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO
3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made
with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which
entities should be and should not be on that list.") is a reasonable
one.

There is no standard definition of a country: is Greenland a separate
country from Denmark? Puerto-Rico from the USA? Is Europe a country
now that it has a money? And if the european constitution had been
adopted?

Clearly, we (wether "we" is the CS or ICANN or "the community")
should not engage into such a discussion.


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