3mo ago

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

every.to The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

How geopolitics can alter digital infrastructure

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It’s strange to me that they wouldn’t simply reassign control of it to another… erm, what’s the word?, at least for the technology-related domains.
- I was wondering the same. It's a very popular TLD, so you'd think they would grandfather it in as a generic (non-country) TLD like .net or whatever.
  
  Country code domains are decided by international agreement on two character abbreviations per country, and IANA needs to abide by that.
  For example, can you imagine IANA caught In the middle of whether ‘.cn’ should be owned by China or Taiwan? What a disaster that would be. Their only sustainable approach is to stay out of it, and just follow what the UN says
  
  I generally agree, but .io stands for "indian ocean", which isn't a country.
  
  “Territories of the Indian Ocean” which had been internationally recognized as a political entity and is no more.
  An important consideration is what if something becomes internationally recognized with that two character abbreviation? How is it IANA’s business to disagree with the world?
- at least for the technology-related domains.
  It's not a technology related domain though; it's a country's domain that happens to be used for a lot of tech.
  With the country dissolving, the domain does too, so it can become available for future countries.
  
  Wouldn’t the country and domain dissolving mean it can be reassigned? I don’t understand why after that it would still be considered a country TLD only available for future countries.
  
  Because 2 letter tlds are reserved to be issued to countries. Ideally the country's 2 letter country code.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain
  All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs.
- An important piece of history missing from this article is that back when IANA was formalized, they realized they couldn’t be the ones to arbitrate country level domains. There was already an international organization formalizing two character codes for country names, so they basically said that would be the decider.
  In the same way, it’s not up to them whether to recognize a country’s existence, they rely on that international agreement and they need to abide by that

85 comments