[governance] UN controls the country code part of the Internet root, not US

[Keith Davidson]

On 20/12/2013 5:42 a.m., Milton L Mueller wrote:
> This has been a useful and interesting discussion.
> Just for the record, however, the header of this thread is completely wrong.
> The UN does NOT control the "country code part" of the DNS root.
> A UN agency makes up two-letter alphabetic character strings and uniquely assigns them to geographic entities (which are not necessarily "countries" by the way). When or how those codes get into the DNS root and matched to an IP address is entirely in the hands of ICANN/IANA, which means that it ultimately has to be approved by the US government.
> Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "country code part of the Internet root." There is a DNS root, full stop.
> A country code is a top level domain just like any other, in technical terms.

Succinctly summarised Milton... And the idea of using ISO 3166 arose 
from Postel and others, encapsulated in RFC1591 (1994):
------
  4.2 Country Codes
  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.
-----
This was a useful public policy assertion from prior to US Govt control 
(or UN knowledge) of the Internet's unique identifiers.

Cheers

Keith

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