[governance] Countries and ccTLDs

[Bertrand de La Chapelle]

Stephane,

Thanks for the comments and precisions, particularly on the origins of
ccTLDs. I was right ot put a caveat. And on the registrieS for
national DomainS.

Apologies for the 600 lines ! Just a stupid copy/paste of the whole thread
in trying to set a separate thread....

On a specific point, without prolongating the discussion further, you
wrote  :


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.


This just proves the point of the whole thread nurtured by Parminder and
Izumi (among others) : ccTLDs have a national dimension but are not limited
to countries. Maybe, they could be characterized as being "geography-based"
- as opposed to "thematically-based" (ie for instance the various sponsored
TLDs under discussion.

We (whoever that is) should not probably engage, as you suggest, in the
definition of what a country is. But you know that this is a clear
preoccupation for national governments - and I suppose rightly so. As a
result the issue cannot be wiped away easily in future discussions.

You mentionned the EU. You probably remember that in the discussions leading
up to the creation of the .eu, some debate emerged on the limitation of the
.EU to actors based in the european union or in Europe as a whole. I confess
I did not check what the outcome is in the final regime put in place a few
days ago.

In any case, the question about who - or what entities - should be granted
the right to establish and manage a domain name is clearly on the Agenda.
Exploring a diverse range of cases is a useful way to "feel" the whole space
of the issue.

Best

Bertrand



On 12/15/05, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at internatif.org> wrote:
>
> 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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